The Benefits of Wild Landscape Design
Wildness doesn’t have to mean disorder. Here are some things it brings to the garden and life
Wild gardens are a hot design trend, but what exactly are they? For many, wildness is an aspect of nature that feels distant and removed from our everyday lives. And yet wildness, the situations and species that make nature alive and evolving, are always around us. Certainly, wild nature is clawing to come in from the edges of our modern lives. Wolves and mountain lions, key predators, sometimes wander into urban centers. Native bees often find superior forage in vacant lots. Birds and butterflies migrate through our backyards without staying long.
Incorporating wildness doesn’t mean having an unkempt space, and it doesn’t mean enjoying ticks. It means rethinking our relationships with nature and how to make a healthy home through a more conscientious kind of garden design.
Incorporating wildness doesn’t mean having an unkempt space, and it doesn’t mean enjoying ticks. It means rethinking our relationships with nature and how to make a healthy home through a more conscientious kind of garden design.
Wildness for energy conservation. By strategically placing plant material around our buildings, we can reduce cooling and heating costs and help mitigate climate change. Shrubs along south and west walls can reduce the amount of sun hitting a home, as can layered tall and small understory trees, all while creating critical habitat for wildlife. Even vines on a trellis leaning against a wall can help cool a structure. Conifers on the north can slow winter winds while providing shelter for winter songbirds.
Landscapes that allow water to collect or penetrate slowly after a rainfall help us reduce the drain on resources associated with producing clean water to quench our garden’s thirst.
When we use plants adapted to site conditions — from sun to soil — we can almost eliminate the need for fertilizers, which require intense amounts of energy and water to produce.
Landscapes that allow water to collect or penetrate slowly after a rainfall help us reduce the drain on resources associated with producing clean water to quench our garden’s thirst.
When we use plants adapted to site conditions — from sun to soil — we can almost eliminate the need for fertilizers, which require intense amounts of energy and water to produce.
Wildness for healing. At first it can be a little unnerving to walk in the woods, wade in the ocean or get lost down a desert trail. When we leave behind the security of the familiar, our bodies become tensely alert. Once we can move beyond the fear of dark forests and undulating waves, something invariably switches inside us — we calm down, we let go of our preconceptions, we get into balance with a rhythm that pulses through every living thing. We know this rhythm in the sound of switchgrass in the backyard like the switchgrass in the prairie, or the fountain bubbling like the stream coming down a mountain.
There’s a reason butterfly gardens are popping up outside hospitals and treatment centers, and why street trees add significant value to neighborhoods and homes. We know in our bones that interaction with wildness produces a healing sensation that also makes us more invested in caring for our towns and one another.
There’s a reason butterfly gardens are popping up outside hospitals and treatment centers, and why street trees add significant value to neighborhoods and homes. We know in our bones that interaction with wildness produces a healing sensation that also makes us more invested in caring for our towns and one another.
Wildness is not something beyond us in some other place. It is who we are. We need every bit of nature in our lives to be healthy, connected and full of hope. When we create garden landscapes that are both for our benefit and the benefit of other species, we remember our sheer luck in being alive, and the necessity of passing our good fortune on to the future.
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We can plant a garden for wildness with a certain degree of order. This can mean using native plants that native wildlife need to complete their life cycles. It can mean planting large drifts of grasses and flowers along sidewalks or in parks, or having city planters filled with coneflowers or poppy mallow or asters. Urban wildness can mean using few pesticides and fertilizers. Sometimes wildness is as simple as letting a self-sown milkweed, blown in on the breeze, grow among a straight line of lilies.