Landscape stewardship, in Germany and elsewhere, is a broad field of study that draws from natural and cultural sciences, geography sciences, planning, engineering sciences, and garden architecture. Its origin can be traced back to the ‘Landesverschönerung’, i.e., beautification of the country, a cultural paradigm driven by ideas from the Enlightenment beginning in the nineteenth century. The concept being to combine elements of functional value with elements of beauty, in the best possible way. In 1907–1908, Robert Mielke suggested using the term ‘Landespflege’ (landscape stewardship) instead of ‘beautification of the country’, which expanded to include aspects of protecting and preserving historical townscapes, cultural and historical traditions as well as forests and other elements of nature (Heimatschutz). However, landscape stewardship was never only preservation. During the Nazi era, landscape stewardship was declared a national responsibility (Erhard Mäding), with the help of which new ‘German’ landscapes were to be created, especially in the occupied territories in the East. After the war and until the 1980s, landscape stewardship, now increasingly based on scientific principles, became a kind of ‘super-discipline’ that had to cover a very wide range of objectives, supported by chairs at universities, traineeships, specialists in administrations and planning offices. The overly broad, hardly conveyable claim to the subject area, but also to some extent the burden from the Nazi era, led to a fragmentation and renaming into nature conservation and landscape maintenance, landscape planning, landscape and garden architecture, environmental planning, ecological engineering, and biology.