Landscape designer Darrel Morrison is a vanguard of the land ethic promoted by early conservation hero Aldo Leopold. He joins me on the podcast this week with Curt Meine, a senior fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation, to share how a landscape can be both aesthetically pleasing and ecologically restorative.
Darrel is a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and a professor emeritus and former dean at the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia. He’s also an honorary faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture. His book is “Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature,” in which he shares the people and places that influenced him.
Landscape designer Darrel Morrison, foreground, with Curt Meine, senior fellow of the Aldo Leopold Foundation in Sauk County, Wisconsin.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation suggested this format where we could periodically work together for a new type of podcast on the topic of “Land Ethic in Action.” Curt joins me to represent the foundation and bring the foundation’s resources to the show.
I first met Darrel at the Arboretum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison last August. The university is home to a 72-acre restored prairie, the world’s first ecological restoration project. Darrel designed a native plant garden at the University that complements the 90-year-old prairie. It was a real treat to get a personal tour.
Get to Know Darrel Morrison
Darrel grew up in Oliver, Iowa, on a 160-acre farm. There were four farms on a square mile, each a perfect square, which was typical of late 18th century land division, Curt points out.
Darrel was very conscious of place from a young age. His home was the Morrison Place. His neighbors’ farms were the Mitchell Place and the McBride Place.
“Even now, I think it is really important for designers of landscapes to reflect the place they’re in so you know where you are, when you are, in a particular place.”
That’s been the guiding philosophy of his career since 1967.
His parents gave him and his two brothers each his own 10-by-10-foot plot in the garden to plant whatever they wanted.
“I started out very conventionally — little rows of radishes and lettuce and so forth partly because they were so quickly rewarding. And then I got into planting patterns. I did circles and squares with my plantings.”
By junior high, he was the self-appointed head gardener of his family.
“My dad was a little disgruntled when I entered the Adair County Fair, the flower arranging contest. But I did that, and kind of swept the show,” Darrel says, “I used cornstalks and oats and various things with flowers, and happened to have a very tolerant or adventuresome judge who gave me a lot of prizes. So I was designing with plants very early.”
After graduating from Iowa State with a landscape architecture degree, Darrel worked briefly as a landscape architect. Then he was drafted into the Army, and after that, he worked for Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission. In 1962, his boss there turned him on to the book “American Plants for American Gardens,” co-authored by Edith Roberts, an ecologist, and Elsa Raymond, a landscape architect, published in 1929.
“I couldn’t put it down. It was a wonderful book,” Darrel recalls. “And again, the linking of ecology with design with those two authors was a great model for me as well.”
“The book is a series of descriptions of different plant communities in the northeastern United States and how they could be incorporated into design, and beautiful poetic descriptions of those native communities. And so that made me think, I really need to know more ecology. I need to know more about plant communities, the dynamics of them. And at about that time, I decided to go back to school.”
He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin in 1967 and graduated two years later with a master’s degree in landscape architecture.
“The prairie restorations here at the arboretum — the first in the world — really stimulated me,” he says.
It struck him that the beautiful compositions were designed not by landscape designers but by scientists.
“They’re really beautiful, and we need to learn more science to back up our design,” he remembers thinking.
The Curtis Prairie at the arboretum was 32 years old then. The 72-acre restoration is now 90 years old and still going strong.
It occurred to Darrel that elements of ecological restoration should be incorporated into landscape designs.
“I thought, they’re so beautiful, it’s ridiculous not to use them. Then I’ve come up with lots more reasons to use them too, a big part of it being to express the sense of place where you are. And if you work with native plant communities in the region where you’re working, then that is just the perfect beginning.”
The first prairie project he designed was for an insurance company in Madison. It was two acres, and it was radical. Some people asked the insurance company if its lawn mower had broken down, while others thought the project was pretty.
That led to an 80-acre project for General Electric Corporation for a site between Madison and Milwaukee.
Darrel went on to work for a time in Texas at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center with David Northington, a plant scientist.
“We spent time in Texas looking at the natural communities, and that helped to inspire what I did there,” Darrel says. “And the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, for example, had demonstration plots where you could show different plant communities distilled into the small squares.”
Darrel was later the dean of environmental design at the University of Georgia, where he taught for 20 years. “I like to think I influenced that program a lot, bringing the native plant element into it,” he says.
He “retired” in 2004 and moved to New York City, where he worked on projects for New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Storm King Art Center. He enjoyed showing people in that part of the world that they could draw on native plant communities and make it beautiful. He could show people possibilities that they did not know existed, he says.
He returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2016.
A prairie planting design by Darrel Morrison at a General Electric facility in Pewaukee, Wisconsin, 1980.
Photo Credit: Darrel Morrison
What Is a Prairie?
Prairie is the French word for meadow, but a prairie is more than a meadow. A prairie is a large, open area of grassland.
Curt says the word arose in North America when the French explored the mid-continent and saw large, open expanses. They had never seen anything like it before in France, but a meadow was the closest thing to it.
A meadow is an opening in the woods, but the prairie goes to the horizon, Darrel says.
Prairies are a powerful landscape model, both ecologically and visually. They are also fire-dependent, as Darrel explains, because without the routine fires that started naturally or were set by Native Americans prior to colonization, they quickly became populated by trees and shrubs.
Darrel Morrison’s Four Goals in Landscape Design
Darrel keeps four goals in focus when designing a landscape.
First of all, it must be ecologically sound. It should not require a lot of artificial inputs or imported inputs, and it must not diminish natural diversity.
It should be experientially rich.
“There’s absolutely no conflict between those two,” he says of being both ecologically sound and experientially rich. “The aesthetics are directly related to the composition, which has evolved naturally in native plant communities.”
The landscape should be of the place. That means it should reflect the area where it is located. It shouldn’t feel like an imitation of someplace else or an amalgam of many plant communities.
“I don’t like the idea of planting a Midwestern prairie in the East,” he says. “There are certain species that are appropriate, and certainly Long Island had lots of them. But I do think we should respect the place we’re in and not have a collection of plant communities from all over.”
And the landscape should be dynamic, meaning it should be permitted to change over time.
“The landscape you see in 2003 will be different from the one you see in 2010,” he says. “I’ve certainly seen that at the arboretum here because we planted the four-acre native plant garden around the visitor center in 2002 and 2003, and now we’re 20 plus years into that. And seeing the evolution is just wonderful.”
Darrel Morrison’s Native Plant Garden design for the University of Wisconsin.
Photo Credit: Susan Carpenter
Studying Plant Communities Up Close
Getting to know and understand plant communities requires being among them.
“While teaching at the University of Wisconsin, I started taking students on field trips to the point that we did a three-week field course that I co-taught with an ecologist, Evelyn Howell, from 1973 until ’84,” Darrel recalls. “And so I was in a lot of natural areas where we did field studies. We did meter-square quadrats for herbaceous things. We did a hundred-meter quadrats for forests and savannas. And when you look that closely at plant communities, you know them. You can’t get it all from a book. But in the field, you see the plants, you see the movement, you smell the smells. And then you see it evolving over time too.”
A mesic prairie section in the Native Plant Garden at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum.
Photo Credit: Robert Jaeger
The Destruction of America’s Prairies
Land division laws in the 1780s saw prairie divided up efficiently for private ownership.
“That allowed us to wipe out the native prairie of North America so quickly,” Curt says, noting that all prairie that had existed prior to European settlement is nearly all gone.
Many native plants in prairies had roots that were so deep that they could not be removed until the advent of the first self-scouring steel plow, invented by John Deere. They replaced cast iron plows.
“That allowed for the efficient destruction for conversion to agriculture,” Curt says. “And of course, a lot of good came from that. But we also lost this immense diversity and productivity and fertility of our soils. We degraded our waterways. We’ve lost the habitats of who knows how many thousands of species.”
But that depressing story took a turn in the 1930s in Wisconsin when Aldo Leopold and his contemporaries undertook the first experiments in prairie restoration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Arboretum. This took place amid the Dust Bowl years, when wind erosion and drought in the Midwest led to severe dust storms.
“This place has played such an important role in the rethinking of our role in nature and of our capacity, not only to cause harm, but to also begin to heal,” Curt says.
How Prairie Destruction Led to the Dust Bowl
Aldo Leopold was very concerned about soil erosion. “This was the crisis of its day,” Curt says. “This was the climate change of its time.”
Leopold sounded the alarm that civilization was at risk if soils were not conserved and rebuilt.
“Leopold, as an early ecologist, understood that in the Midwest of the U.S. prairie is where you have to turn, not only for the literal materials — the plants and animals — but for the understanding of how native ecosystems survive, thrive, and perpetuate themselves and stabilize the world we live in,” Curt says.
Merging Ecology with Design
Darrel conducted field studies at Curtis Prairie 33 years after Aldo Leopold and others established it. And then another 30 years later, Darrel was invited back by the university to design and create the native plant garden overlooking the prairie.
“It isn’t just the individual organisms and their prettiness,” Curt says of appreciating native plants. “Because many of these plant species are very pretty. But Darrel takes it to that next level of thinking about not just the individual plant, but how that particular species occurs in the native landscape of a prairie or a savannah or other types of ecosystem.”
Darrel took the thinking, development and application to the next stage — beyond just the individual pretty organism, Curt says. Darrel took it to “the patterns and the evolutionary rightness of the way you plant things together and how they occur in nature.”
“I like to see the progression with students,” Darrel adds. “First, they see the pretty plants, and then they start to see patterns, and then they can think about the processes that lead to the patterns. And then beyond that, you can start to think about preserving and restoring those into a design landscape.”
A meadow in a clearing.
Photo Courtesy of The Clearing
Darrel’s Legacy in Ecological Design
Darrel has helped students to understand the importance of refraining from destroying diversity in their work.
“Anytime that a design landscape diminishes the diversity of the site that might have been there previously, that’s going in the wrong direction,” he says.
He encourages valuing all species that were there before we were, and keeping a place for them.
“Protecting existing natural areas is high on the list because once they’re gone, you can’t really replicate them,” he says.
Darrel Morrison’s book “Beauty of the Wild,” published by the Library of American Landscape History” in 2021.
Photo Credit: Robert Jaeger
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Darrel Morrison and Curt Meine. If you haven’t listened yet, you can do so now by scrolling to the top of the page and clicking the Play icon in the green bar under the page title.
Have you incorporated native grasses in your landscape? Let us know in the comments below.
Links & Resources
Some product links in this guide are affiliate links. See full disclosure below.
Episode 103: How to Create a Backyard Meadow: Simple Steps for Success No Matter the Space
Episode 142: Why Our Plant Choices Matter: Nature’s Best Hope, with Doug Tallamy
Episode 152: The Native Plant Trust: Why Plant Choices Matter
Episode 197: The Many Benefits of Building a Naturalistic Garden, with Kelly Norris
Episode 234: Converting Lawn into Meadow
Episode 237: Ecological Gardening: Creating Beauty & Biodiversity
Episode 247: Promoting a New Garden Ethic, with Benjamin Vogt
Episode 330: Natural Garden Design Basics, with Benjamin Vogt
Episode 331: The Ecological Garden Blueprint: 10 Essential Steps That Matter Most
Episode 373: The Land Ethic: Aldo Leopold’s Conservation Philosophy
joegardener Online Gardening Academy™: Popular courses on gardening fundamentals; managing pests, diseases & weeds; seed starting and more.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Organic Vegetable Gardening: My new premium online course. The course is designed to be a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, nurturing and harvesting your favorite vegetables, no matter what you love to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Seed Starting: Everything you need to know to start your own plants from seed — indoors and out.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Beginning Gardener Fundamentals: Essential principles to know to create a thriving garden.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Growing Epic Tomatoes: Learn how to grow epic tomatoes with Joe Lamp’l and Craig LeHoullier.
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Master Pests, Diseases & Weeds: Learn the proactive steps to take to manage pests, diseases and weeds for a more successful garden with a lot less frustration. Just $47 for lifetime access!
joegardener Online Gardening Academy Perfect Soil Recipe Master Class: Learn how to create the perfect soil environment for thriving plants.
“Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature” by Darrel Morrison
Milorganite® – Our podcast episode sponsor and Brand Partner of joegardener.com
Disclosure: Some product links in this guide are affiliate links, which means we get a commission if you make a purchase. However, none of the prices of these resources have been increased to compensate us, and compensation is not an influencing factor on their inclusion here. The selection of all items featured in this post and podcast was based solely on merit and in no way influenced by any affiliate or financial incentive, or contractual relationship. At the time of this writing, Joe Lamp’l has professional relationships with the following companies who may have products included in this post and podcast: Milorganite, Soil3, Territorial Seed Company, Proven Winners ColorChoice, and Dramm. These companies are either Brand Partners of joegardener.com and/or advertise on our website. However, we receive no additional compensation from the sales or promotion of their product through this guide. The inclusion of any products mentioned within this post is entirely independent and exclusive of any relationship.
