How to combine ‘rewilding’ with landscape design
I love driving down Glamorgan Road. From time to time, a vista opens up on the left or right; a wetland creates a break in the forest, leading the eye into the distance. It’s a pattern that repeats on many of the county’s highways, showing that nature can arrange itself in ways we find intrinsically pleasing.
Grounded sits in the middle of a continuum. On one side is rewilding, the movement to bring back nature into areas damaged by humans, and on the other garden design, which creates landscapes humans find pleasant.
We like to think we’re combining both to create a happy medium. How do we do that? And why is it important to pleasure humans as much as we please nature?
Nature’s intrinsic beauty
Natural landscapes already contain powerful aesthetic principles. In our Glamorgan Road vistas, perhaps a lower elevation coupled with the work of beavers creates an area where water accumulates, changing the make-up of vegetation that grows on its edges. That gradient from low-growing plants to trees is pleasing, as is a beaver pond in the foreground and a creek in the distance.
A forest is layered. A tall canopy, mid-size understory trees and shrubs, and low-growing groundcovers create a composition that just makes sense to our eyes.
A prairie or scrub has drifts of different vegetation – with a different colour or texture – that follows the line of a watercourse or a change in soil composition.
When we work on our designs, we identify their inherent patterns and then amplify them to create landscapes that are inherently pleasing. While traditional landscape design begins with aesthetics, we begin with nature and amp up its natural beauty. That’s how you get landscapes that are as beautiful to nature as they are to us.
A design for an open area near a cottage – perhaps a sunny septic leach bed – might be modelled on a prairie. These wide-open spaces have a matrix of grasses within which grow herbaceous perennials. Where a wild prairie might contain 50 species creating visual chaos, we select maybe ten that capture the essential character while providing clearer visual rhythm. We exaggerate natural clumping patterns to create designs that feel organic but have a more readable structure. We enhance seasonal progressions by choosing plants that ensure reliable spring-to-fall interest rather than the hit-or-miss timing of wild communities. We repeat plant groupings to enhance coherence.
Think of where the forest meets the open clearing where a cottage is constructed. In nature, perhaps where forest meets wetland along Glamorgan Road, lower understory trees would frame the edge of the forest, making the most of the light from the open area. It creates a transition from forest to wetland, which is pleasing to us as well as having the biodiverse qualities of an ‘edge community’. We do the same, planting shrubs and small trees to bridge the gap, but carefully choosing species to maximize the effect of the edge, enhancing it using different leaf textures or amplifying spring blooms or colourful fall foliage.
Reading the landscape
Rewilding does a fantastic job bringing nature back. But without adding a touch of design, it might lack the legibility that humans find pleasing. Subtle sight lines, species groups and drifts, height variations – these all make the design legible, helping us understand and navigate the space.
That kind of understanding is vital because we need to make human-created landscapes acceptable to the human eye if we want to encourage more biodiverse ones. We have the humility to see that nature knows how to create beauty naturally and the wisdom to help others see that, too.