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."
