"In Beauty of the Wild, Darrel Morrison tells stories of people and places that have nourished his career as a teacher and a designer of nature-inspired landscapes. For more than six decades, Morrison has drawn inspiration from the varied landscapes of his life. For Morrison, however, there is also a deeper motivation for designing these landscapes. Strongly influenced by Aldo Leopold's observation that people start to appreciate nature initially through its pretty elements, he explains: 'From admiring individual plants within a big composition, you can move 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 how you can perpetuate that, and even deeper, you really start to think about protecting, preserving, and restoring these qualities in the landscapes we are responsible for.'"--Book jacket flap.