Natural Landscaping with Darrel Morrison

This Week's Podcast: A Replay: Nature and Art's Champion, Darrel Morrison

Click on the small black arrow on the bar to listen, or the MP3 to download the show:

MP3 File

The definition of a mentor is someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced person. That word is used perhaps a bit too often, these days. I can say that Darrel Morrison is a mentor to many and influenced hundreds if not thousands of students, amateurs and professionals whether for their own home garden or when pursuing a career in landscape architecture.In many cases, he’s changed the path of their work if not their lives. Students may go in thinking they want to hear about a few shrubs, concrete paving and some mulch, and come out being native landscape enthusiasts if not zealots.
For decades, Morrison has been a champion of native and natural design. He not only advocates growing plants that are local to a place, but also creating, recreating and preserving the habitat and plant communities that once flourished there. He says, “We have a responsibility to perpetuate the richness we’ve inherited.”
Morrison has designed landscapes at Storm King Art Center, The Chicago Botanic Garden, Lady Bird Wildflower Center, Utah Botanical Center, and the recently opened Native Flora Extension at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (below).

He was most recently the Adjunct Professor at Columbia University School of Continuing Education, Program in Landscape Design, 2007-2014.
“Planting Design, which I think should be called ‘Ecological Art,’” he says, “in that it potentially merges Ecology with Art. I believe landscapes we design and manage should be:
Experientially rich
Ecologically sound
‘Of the Place’
Dynamic, changing over time.”
Click on this link to see short film on Mr. Morrison.