I have begun to read Jean Leclercq's The Love of Learning and the Desire for God (Fordham University Press, 1961; reprinted in 2009).  The book is a delight, and a treasure of insight into aspects of the middle ages.  Here is Leclercq on how a monk of this era might look at nature, how they would "see" nature.  Note how the world is viewed through biblical/theological categories:

"Of course, these men admire nature; they praise the beauty of a spot which they sometimes say 'delights' them.  A founder of a monastery would choose a site because of its pleasantness: loci iucunditas; a hermit will prefer for his retreat 'a beautiful forest.'  But their admiration is not aroused, as ours is, by the picturesque.  The pleasurable aspect they appreciate is more moral than material: a beautiful forest is above all a forest suited to the solitary life; a 'Beaulieu' is a place which has been made fertile.  And since eschatology never loses its rights, every garden where spiritual delights are found recalls Paradise and is described in the lush images which, in the Bible, depicted the garden of the Spouse or of the first Adam.  The cloister is a 'true paradise,' and the surrounding countryside shares in its dignity.  Nature 'in the raw,' unembellished by work of art, inspires the learned man with a sort of horror: the abysses and peaks which we like to gaze at are to him an occasion of fear.  A wild spot, not hallowed by prayer and asceticism and not the scene of any spiritual life, is, as it were in the state of original sin.  But once it has become fertile and purposeful, it takes on the utmost significance." (p. 130)

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