Beauty of the Wild Talk at MTA

Labor Day Author Talk: Darrel Morrison -- Beauty of the Wild: A Life Designing Landscapes Inspired by Nature

Cost of Admission: This program is free. Register for this Zoom Webinar at https://www.mtarboretum.org/events

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

Published by the Library of American Landscape History

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—the movement of grasses in the wind, clouds across the sky, their shadows over the plain.

For more than six decades, Morrison has drawn inspiration from the varied landscapes of his life—from the Iowa prairie to Texas prickly pear scrub to the maple-beech-hemlock forests of Door County, Wisconsin, to the banks of the Oconee River in Piedmont Georgia. In native plant gardens at the University of Wisconsin Arboretum, New York Botanical Garden, and Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Morrison has blended communities of native plants in distillations of prairie, woodland, and coastal meadow. At Storm King Art Center, his landscapes capture the essence of prairie grasslands and native meadows. These ever-evolving compositions were designed to reintroduce diversity, natural processes, and naturally occurring patterns—the “beauty of the wild”—into the landscape.

DARREL MORRISON is a renowned landscape architect and educator whose ecology-based approach to design has influenced generations of practitioners, particularly his students 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.