Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature

by Darrel Morrison

Overview

Selected by Gardens Illustrated for "The Best Gardening Books to Read in 2022"

Selected by American Horticultural Society for "Top 10 Books of 2021"

In Beauty of the Wild, Darrel Morrison tells stories of people and places that have nourished his career as a teacher and a designer of nature-inspired landscapes. Growing up on a small farm in southwestern Iowa, Morrison was transported by the subtle beauties of the native prairie landscape. As a graduate student at University of Wisconsin–Madison, he encountered the Curtis Prairie, one of the first places in the world where ecological restoration was practiced. There he saw the beauty inherent in ecological diversity. At Wisconsin, too, Morrison was introduced to the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, that we have a responsibility to perpetuate the richness we have inherited in nature. He has been guided as well by the teachings of Jens Jensen, who believed that we can't successfully copy nature, but we can get a theme from it and use key species to evoke that essential feeling.

For more than six decades, Morrison has drawn inspiration from the varied landscapes of his life. In native plant gardens at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he has blended communities of native plants in distillations of regional prairies, woodlands, bogs, and coastal meadows. At Storm King Art Center in the Hudson Highlands, his landscapes capture the essence of upstate New York meadows. These ever-evolving compositions were designed to reintroduce diversity, natural processes, and naturally occurring patterns—the “beauty of the wild”—into the landscape.

For Morrison, however, there is also a deeper motivation for designing these landscapes. Strongly influenced by Aldo Leopold's observation that people start to appreciate nature initially through its pretty elements, he explains: “From admiring individual plants within a big composition, you can move to starting to see patterns, and then this leads to starting to think about processes that have led to the patterns. It is a progression. You start to think more about why things are where they are, and how you can perpetuate that, and even deeper, you really start to think about protecting, preserving, and restoring these qualities in the landscapes we are responsible for.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781952620287
Publisher:	Library Of American Landscape History
Publication date:	06/15/2021
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	8.40(w) x 10.10(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Darrel Morrison is a renowned landscape designer and educator whose ecology-based approach has influenced generations of practitioners. He has taught ecology-based landscape design at University of Wisconsin–Madison (1969–1983) and University of Georgia (1983–2005). Morrison lived and worked in New York City from 2005 until 2015, and now lives in Madison, where he is an Honorary Faculty Associate in the Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Wisconsin

Table of Contents

Prologue: Wheatfield under Thunderclouds 3

1. Iowa Farm 7

2. Out of the Nest 21

3. Early Forays in Design 31

4. Merging Ecology with Design 39

5. Southern Odyssey 69

6. Expanding Horizons 97

7. New York City Decade 121

8. Restoring the Beauty of the Wild 143

9. Under a Montana Sky 153

Epilogue: Back to the Prairie 165

Notes 169

Acknowledgments 173

Index 177

Editorial Reviews

Some gardeners react to any mention of ecological landscaping — the merging of environmental science and art — as if it were a compromise or concession meant to limit their creativity. Darrel Morrison, a landscape architect who has been practicing and teaching this philosophy for some five decades, begs to differ.

New York Times, In the Garden - Margaret Roach

Darrel Morrison traces the origins of nature-inspired design through his own education and 60-year career as a landscape architect and educator. Morrison's engaging writing reflects his passion for teaching, and rewards readers with lessons he harvested throughout life, from his Iowa farm roots to the legacies he's written in the landscape….Beauty of the Wild provides an abundance of lessons for gardeners and professionals alike in connecting ecology and design. Given the ever-growing popularity of the naturalistic garden movement, this insightful book is right on topic.

Kimberly Toscanon Gardener

Although they are generally an articulate lot, garden and landscape people rarely write their autobiographies. So it is a pleasure to read this one by Darrel Morrison, one of the key people in what has been one of the greatest developments in our field for decades – the American native plant movement. This book is an insight into the changes that are being made in the way that landscapes are being planted in the USA.

Gardens Illustrated - Noel Kingsbury

In a sense, all of our yards and gardens, no matter how old, represent an obliteration of the wild plant communities that once marked the land, none more poignantly lost than the American prairie. The prairie's demise is linked more to agriculture than urbanization, but still, we are trying in our limited and stumbling way to make up for the loss by planting perennials and grasses of native origin. We'd do well, then, to seek guidance from Darrel Morrison, who has spent a fruitful life designing with native flora and teaching others how to do the same.

The Washington Post - Adrian Higgins

Darrel Morrison traces the origins of nature-inspired design through his own education and 60-year career as a landscape architect and educator. Morrison’s engaging writing reflects his passion for teaching, and rewards readers with lessons he harvested throughout life, from his Iowa farm roots to the legacies he’s written in the landscape….Beauty of the Wild provides an abundance of lessons for gardeners and professionals alike in connecting ecology and design. Given the ever-growing popularity of the naturalistic garden movement, this insightful book is right on topic.

January 2022 Kimberly Toscanon Gardener

Darrel Morrison traces the origins of nature-inspired design through his own education and 60-year career as a landscape architect and educator. Morrison’s engaging writing reflects his passion for teaching, and rewards readers with lessons he harvested throughout life, from his Iowa farm roots to the legacies he’s written in the landscape….Beauty of the Wild provides an abundance of lessons for gardeners and professionals alike in connecting ecology and design. Given the ever-growing popularity of the naturalistic garden movement, this insightful book is right on topic.

American Gardener, January 2022 - Kimberly Toscano