Has human appreciation of the "beauty" of landscapes and environments been ever present in the written record (outside of strictly record-keeping) or is it a trend that developed during identifiable periods of time across cultures?

I can't speak to whether the appreciation of beautiful landscapes appears from the earliest written records or not, but I can identify a trend in 1st century BCE/CE Roman literature.

This is the concept of the locus amoenus ("pleasant place") - an idyllic location of beauty, safety and comfort common in, for example, pastoral poetry.

The 1st century BCE poet Horace wrote the Ars Poetica ("Art of Poetry") in which he counsels against writing purple passages unnecessarily (Loeb translation):

Works with noble beginnings and grand promises often have one or two purple patches so stitched on as to glitter far and wide, when Diana's grove and altar, and "the winding stream a-speeding 'mid fair fields" or the river Rhine, or the rainbow is being described [examples probably from poems of his day]. For such things there is a place, but not just now.

It's evident from Horace's passage that poets enjoyed capturing the beauty of the natural world with equally beautiful ("glittering") words. It's worth reading Stephen Hinds chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid ("Landscape with Figures: Aesthetics of Place in the Metamorphoses and its Tradition") for more discussion of this motif. The locus amoenus is used in different ways by different poets, of course - the landscape as inspiration, for example - but beauty is central.

You might enjoy this 1st century CE piece from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Book 3 (Loeb translation):

There was a vale in that region, thick grown with pine and cypress with their sharp needles. 'Twas called Gargaphie, the sacred haunt of high-girt Diana. In its most secret nook there was a well-shaded grotto, wrought by no artist's hand. But Nature by her own cunning had imitated art; for she had shaped a native arch of the living rock and soft tufa [limestone]. A sparkling spring with its slender stream babbled on one side and widened into a pool girt with grassy banks. Here the goddess of the wild woods, when weary with the chase, was wont to bathe her maiden limbs in the crystal water.

A few points worth noting:

In much of his poetry, Ovid demonstrates an interest in the relationship between nature and art/artfulness/artifice. His description here fits into that interest.
This grotto is "wrought by no artist's hand". Grottoes, including artificial ones, were fairly popular around this time, especially in imperial villas - such as the cave at Sperlonga, which was part of Tiberius' villa.
This particular grotto in the Metamorphoses is one of Ovid's inverted loci amoeni - in Ovid the locus amoenus is often a site of incongruous violence (Persephone is abducted by Hades from a locus amoenus in Sicily, for example, and here in Book 3, Diana is surprised at her bath by the unintentional intrusion of the hunter Actaeon and defends her dignity by turning him into a stag that will be torn apart by his own hounds) - the beauty often conceals the danger until it is too late. That's not to say that Ovid's is a moralistic interpretation of the locus amoenus - it could be that the juxtaposition of beauty and suffering appealed to him for some reason (Hinds references different interpretations of Ovid's juxtaposition: Is the violence redeemed by the beauty? Is the beauty corrupted by violence? Given that the violence is often sexual, is there a link between desire and desirable, sensuous places? Given the common associations with hunting, is he pointing to the violence already inherent, a reversal whereby hunter becomes hunted?).
Ovid is possibly having a bit of a go at Horace's strictures (using the locus amoenus to describe Diana's grove, especially since Horace goes on to mention cypresses a line or two later) here; although he certainly uses it many times in other contexts, he does pointedly ignore some of Horace's other advice in his poetry.

Ovid later lamented the loss of the sight of beautiful, welcoming landscapes in his exile poetry. In Tristia 3.10 (Loeb translation):

Why tell of brooks frozen fast with the cold and how brittle water is dug out of the pool? ... I have seen the vast sea stiff with ice, a slippery shell holding the water motionless. ... I have seen fish clinging fast bound in the ice, yet some even then still lived. .. Even when peace prevails, there is timorous dread of war, nor does any man furrow the soil with down-pressed share. A foe this region either sees or fears when it does not see; idle lies the soil abandoned in stark neglect. Not here the sweet grape lying hidden in the leafy shade nor the frothing must brimming the deep vats! Fruits are denied in this region nor here would Acontius have anything on which to write the words for his sweetheart to read [he used an apple to trick Cydippe into swearing to marry him]. One may see naked fields, leafless, treeless - a place, alas! no fortunate man should visit.