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[Darrel Morrison:] At first glance people,
who see a native prairie
or a restored prairie may feel there's nothing there,
just a sea of plants that they might think of as weeds.
Then you start to see the subtle beauty,
the beauty of something like a grass,
and then other subtleties.
The sky and the clouds,
the shadows of the clouds moving over the prairie.
I used to see that over the soybean fields
in Iowa when I was a kid.
I loved to watch the shadows of the clouds move
over the gently rolling topography in Southwest Iowa.
Prairies really opened my eyes to the distinctive native beauty
and unique character of the landscape
that existed before we started tampering with it.
[Narrator:] The native plant garden at the University
of Wisconsin Arboretum, overlooking Curtis Prairie,
is a collection of eleven plant communities clustered
around the visitor center.
Each one flows into the next in a subtle and near seamless mix
of prairie, forest, savannah and fen.
Designed by Darrel Morrison, it is a distillation
of the Prairie Spirit, a North American landscape movement
that is deeply rooted in the soil of the Midwest.
[Darrel Morrison:] I grew up on a farm in Iowa,
a 160 acre farm in the 1940s and 50s.
My father was practicing organic farming before the word
was ever used.
He didn't use chemical fertilizers,
He didn't use chemicals for weed killing.
We pulled weeds a lot.
My parents actually gave each
of the three sons their own little plot
within the vegetable garden.
We could plant anything we wanted.
And I started out with lettuce and radishes in little rows
because they were so quickly rewarding.
I started planting circles and squares
and various patterns with my plants.
Tried peanuts one year.
They were a miserable failure.
We had this opportunity to work on the farm,
well opportunity, requirement.
And we grew a lot of our own food.
I graduated from Iowa State in 1959 with a bachelor's degree
in landscape architecture.
I'd been taught to use trees, shrubs,
lawns and ubiquitous ground covers.
Very low diversity landscapes.
I came to Madison, early July of 1967
because of the ecology program at the University.
I became familiar almost immediately with Curtis Prairie
and the restorations in the Arboretum.
[Narrator:] These restorations focused on recreating a sense
of the prairie ecosystem
that had once covered the heart of North America.
Beginning in 1933, a group of University scientists
and 200 men from the Civilian Conservation Corps planted
thousands of native seedlings on a stretch
of worn-out Wisconsin farmland.
By 1967, when Darrel Morrison first saw Curtis Prairie,
much of its original function
and biotic diversity had been restored.
[Darrel Morrison:] The Curtis Prairie was one
of the first places in the world in fact
where ecological restoration was practiced.
The restored prairies really opened my eyes
to the potential beauty that is connected
with ecological diversity.
That was a turning point for me.
[Narrator:] Prairie beauty
and native diversity were not new elements
in landscape design.
Beginning in 1881, O. C. Simonds used a diverse range
of plant species throughout Graceland Cemetery in Chicago.
In 1893 Frederick Law Olmsted incorporated native plantings
into his lush designs for the World's Columbian Exposition.
At the same time, Jens Jensen began transforming Chicago's
public parks by bringing the essence
of the Illinois prairie into the city.
[Darrel Morrison:] Jens Jensen has a had major impact on me.
Jensen's philosophy was centered on spatial design
and the use of light and shadow.
And he was a real master of creating spaces
that would appear to disappear
so there would be mystery in the landscape.
As he evolved in his career he started using not only native
plants but also natural processes
where he would set things in motion so to speak
and then let there be some change over time
within his landscapes.
The native plant garden at the University
of Wisconsin Arboretum is really drawing
on Jens Jensen's attitude
that we can't really successfully copy nature
but we can get a theme from nature,
we can get a dominant idea,
get the key species and the key feeling.
In the native plant garden we're not doing
pure restoration.
The semi circular-pergola
in the native garden is not a natural form.
That degree of structure contrasts nicely
with the seemingly more wild landscapes surrounding it.
And it gives a bit of a focus to that part of the garden.
There's a spiral maze with Indian grass used
as the enclosing element.
It's a take-off really on mazes in historic gardens
but much more a prairie version of that.
This isn't a replication of anything I've ever seen
in nature, but it captures the sense of the movement
of the grasses that occur in the native prairie.
[Narrator:] One of the most influential people
in ecology-based design was not a landscape architect,
but a forester turned philosopher.
Aldo Leopold.
[Morrison:] Aldo Leopold's book, A Sand County Almanac lays
out a philosophy, the land ethic,
whereby we have a responsibility
to perpetuate the richness we've inherited.
To me that becomes sort of the measure of a designed landscape.
Has it increased that amount of diversity and beauty,
or has it diminished what might have been there previously?
And in the end, what we do should never lead
to a loss of species diversity
on the site we're dealing with or beyond that site.
[Narrator:] Darrel Morrison has designed native plant gardens
based on these same principles at the Storm King Art Center
in New York's Hudson Valley; at the Chicago Botanic Garden;
at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin,
Texas; at the Utah Botanical Center in Kaysville;
and in the Bronx, at the New York Botanical Garden.
[Darrel Morrison:] I've been really influenced
by Aldo Leopold's observation
that people really start to appreciate nature and quality
in nature initially through the pretty elements that
occur there.
They might never have been in a prairie before,
but then they see individual plants within that composition.
You can move from that 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 then you start to think
about how you can perpetuate that,
and if you're a designer you start to think
about how you can utilize that idea.
And even deeper, you really start to think about protecting,
preserving and restoring those qualities in the landscapes
that we are responsible for.