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

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