Darrel Morrison To Speak to Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons

This Sunday, the elder statesman of the ecological landscaping movement will visit the Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons to share how he designs landscapes inspired by nature.

Darrel Morrison, 87, a fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects as well as a professor emeritus and former dean at the School of Environmental Design at the University of Georgia and an honorary faculty member at the University of Wisconsin Department of Planning and Landscape Architecture, will present “Beauty of the Wild,” his talk on his ecology-based approach to design, and the people and landscapes he counts among his influences.

Morrison, who now lives in Madison Wisconsin, has designed landscapes in New York at the New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanic Garden and Storm King Art Center.

“I just love doing those types of work, because it shows people possibilities that they might not have known otherwise,” he said during a phone interview on Friday. “So it’s really great to do a native meadow in Brooklyn Botanic Garden right off Flatbush Avenue.”

Morrison specifies that he doesn’t just use native plants, but he curates native plant communities, just as those plants would occur together naturally in the wild.

When he takes on a design project in a new region, he learns what the native vegetation and plant communities are in that region, and then he uses them in a stylized, symbolic form.

“There are certain forest types and certain grassland types, wetland types, and so I try to stick with those that grow together naturally,” he said. “And I have this sense that if we put plants together in the right environment, that grow together in that environment naturally, it will be beautiful.”

He said he looks for patterns as he sees them in nature.

“If we use the things that do occur together, there will not be aesthetic misfits,” he said.

His intent is to make a landscape that appears as if it was naturally occurring — as if a designer had never been there. His goal is to “capture the essence of the community, where you may select the most important species. You probably couldn’t duplicate the whole composition, but you can get the key species visually and ecologically, and it tends to come out looking right.”

Nonnative plants in home landscapes can stick out as not belonging.

“So often, certainly here in the Midwest, we see Colorado blue spruce planted in front yards,” he noted. “Colorado blue spruce doesn’t belong here, and it always looks out of place to me when it’s here. I think it’s fine in Colorado.”

His talk will include the Hempstead Plains, the grassland in Nassau County that had covered 60,000 acres prior to the European settlement and development of Long Island.

“You had a very extensive grassland on Long Island at one point,” Morrison said. “Most of it is gone now. There are efforts to bring it back.”

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, he designed an area intended to mimic native Long Island grassland and inspire visitors to rethink their landscapes.

“We did a planting there that included a representation of the Hempstead Plains grassland and of the New Jersey Pine Barrens in a very compressed form,” he said.

In a grassland like the Hempstead Plains, about 80 percent of the plants are grasses, he pointed out.

“People, when they do a home garden, tend to want about 80 percent flowers and a very small percentage of grasses, but you really need the texture of the grasses as a refining element within all of the other forms and colors that are occurring there,” he said.

He’s not talking about a turfgrass mix of Kentrucky bluegrass and fescue. Native grassland grasses include blue bluestem, little bluestem, switchgrass and so on.

“Turfgrass is not something I would use a lot,” Morrison said. “I think there are legitimate reasons to use it. If you’re playing croquet or badminton, you want an area with mowed grass, but we have way too much mowed lawn, in my opinion, that is not really functional. And it takes a lot of resources to keep it looking like a good lawn, but yet it’s so sparse with species that it doesn’t provide any habitat for birds, butterflies, bumblebees, that really enliven the landscape.”

He has helped clients convert lawns into meadow, prairie and woodland.

“It’s quite possible to do,” he said.

He prefers to start a meadow from seeds.

“Starting with plants, you get a somewhat more immediate effect. But I really do think that a seeded grassland prairie looks more natural usually, because when we plant individual plants, we tend to fall into old habits of getting things in rows, that sort of thing,” he said.

Rather than rows of plants of the same species, Morrison designs in “drifts.”

“When I study natural landscapes that have occurred totally naturally, there’s usually, for example, a high intensity of one species in a sort of a directional movement, and then it tapers off, and something else picks up in a relay sort of system. And so there is order, but it’s a very subtle order and a complex order, if you will,” he said.

Though the Lyme disease-wary people on the East End of Long Island may hear “meadow” and think “ticks,” Morrison assuaged that concern.

“One can design in such a way that there are mowed swaths that move sort of like a river through the land, through the landscape, through the taller vegetation,” he said. “And probably my best example of that would be at Storm King Art Center, where we planted large islands of tall grasses and wildflowers — predominantly tall grasses — but have broad mowed areas that people can move through walking and not brush against the tall grasses, which is where the ticks are.”

His gardens are designed to sustain themselves without any herbicides or insecticides for maintenance. It’s one of the benefits of native gardening, which is less resource intensive than conventional gardening.

“I go a little farther,” he added. “I don’t even like to use herbicides before planting. Not everybody agrees with me, but I just don’t think we should be putting toxins on the land. My rule is sort of the rule of medicine: do no harm. And so one can plant cover crops for a year or two, species that will keep the weeds under control for a year or two, and then plant a meadow into that without using Roundup. And so that’s big on my list — is to not be adding any toxins that are harmful to, oftentimes, the people who are applying them.”

Morrison has witnessed education about native gardens and attitudes change over many decades.

“When I was an undergraduate, I never really heard the term ‘native plants,’” he said. “We learned a lot of plants, but there was no indication of where they were from. And so we’re putting things from all over the world into a single landscape, in some cases, and then the turf grass thing is another philosophy that has changed a lot. I mean, it used to be just assumed that you would plant turfgrass over 90 percent of a landscape, and now people are questioning that and putting alternative, more diverse vegetation in. …

“I was, I like to think, kind of a pioneer in that. I did a prairie planting for an insurance company in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1972, which was well over 50 years ago now, and it was radical. People were shocked, and now a lot of people are doing it.”

Darrel Morrison will speak at the Bridgehampton Community House, 2357 Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, on Sunday, September 8, at 2 p.m. Admission is $10 for the public, and free for Horticultural Alliance of the Hamptons members. Visit hahgarden.org for more information.