A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
glade
A glade is an open space within a wood, where light reaches the ground and the plants of open country grow inside the forest. Glades are made by a fallen tree, a shallow soil, an outcrop, an old clearing, or grazing, and they hold a different set of species from the wood around them, particularly butterflies and the flowering plants they need. In forestry, a glade is a management feature and is deliberately cut and maintained.
Etymology
The word is English and its origin is not settled, but it is generally taken to be related to glad, in the older sense of bright or shining rather than happy. A glade would then be the bright place in the wood, named for the light in it rather than for the absence of trees. The two senses of glad ran alongside each other in Old English, and the bright one has otherwise disappeared.
Notes
The Everglades take their name from this word by way of the English usage for a grassy open place: the region appeared on nineteenth-century maps as the Ever Glades, a description of a wet grassland that seemed to go on without end.