BEAUTY OF THE WILD: A LIFE DESIGNING LANDSCAPES INSPIRED BY NATURE by Darrel Morrison
Library Of American Landscape History, £30 ISBN 978-1952620287
One of the most influential landscape designers in the USA tells the absorbing story of his career, in both practice and in teaching.
Reviewer Noel Kingsbury is a garden designer and writer.
Although they are generally an articulate lot, garden and landscape people rarely write their autobiographies. So it is a pleasure to read this, by one of the key people in what has been one of the greatest developments in our field for decades – the American native plant movement.
Darrel Morrison has had a distinguished academic career but with plenty of practice too, and has played an important role in the creation of some of the USA’s most significant landscape projects that have involved native species.
Morrison is an engaging writer – his text and life story pulled me in straight away. His memories of farm life as a child in the 1950s in Iowa are a pleasure to read. More striking is his recollection of entering a flower-arranging competition at the county fair at the age of 14.
Morrison was lucky in that his first job, with a planning commission in Maryland, enabled him to use native plants, in which in the early 1960s there was almost zero interest. President Lyndon B Johnson’s wife, ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson, then helped the movement along with her promotion of highway beautification using native wildflowers, thereby making life easier for advocates of naturalistic planting.
An academic career followed, most of it spent at the University of Georgia, and some writing – reading and meeting him in 2001,
I was struck by his clearsighted description of what naturalistic planting design must achieve. It was interesting to discover how his work has clearly been informed by a lifelong love of the visual arts.
This book is a great insight into the huge changes that are being made in the way that landscapes are being planted in the USA, by one of its most engaging spokespeople, who unlike some in the field, has promoted native plants with a quiet and undogmatic patience.