What rewilding gets wrong

Restoration implies an original state to return to. The land does not want its past self. It wants to be in right relationship with its present conditions.

There is a question I have started asking every client who arrives at our first meeting with the word rewilding already in their mouths, already certain it is what they want. Which former glory?

They pause. And then I ask it more specifically: do you mean the land as it existed before your house was built? Before the subdivision? Before the farm that preceded it? Before European settlement? Before the hardwood forest that covered this basin ten thousand years ago, or the sea that preceded that?

Because the land you are standing on has been everything. And rewilding, as the design industry is currently selling it, asks you to return it to something, without ever specifying what that something is, or whether it ever existed in the form you are imagining.

The creek that refused.

I once visited a property where the clients had spent tens of thousands of dollars having their creek cleared and cleaned, the banks stripped bare and reseeded with fescue. They wanted it to look managed. Tended. Intentional. What they got instead was a lesson the land had been trying to teach them from the beginning.

Within three months the banks were deteriorating. The fescue would not hold. They reseeded. It failed again. Each time the creek shrugged off the grass like a horse shrugging off a fly, and each time the clients responded by arguing with it more loudly, with more seed, more money, more insistence that the land become what they had decided it should be.

What had been on those banks before the clearing? Goldenrod. Native bluestems. Plants that had spent centuries learning exactly how to hold that particular soil at that particular angle above that particular water. The land was not failing. The land was refusing. There is a difference, and it is the most important thing I know about working with a piece of ground.

Laundered through aesthetics.

Rewilding arrived in luxury residential design the way most ideas arrive: laundered through aesthetics until the philosophy behind it became decorative. You can see it in every design publication right now: the soft grasses, the undulating meadow, the artful disorder. We let the land lead, the captions say. Beneath the photography, someone installed all of it in a weekend.

I understand the appeal. After decades of over-installed, over-controlled residential landscapes, something in us is right to want the opposite. The rebellion makes sense. What does not make sense is calling it restoration.

Restoration implies an original state to return to. It is, at its core, a nostalgic proposition. And nostalgia has never been a reliable design philosophy, because the past it reaches for is always invented. When I walk a property for the first time, I am not looking for evidence of what it used to be. I am looking for what it is already trying to become.

It requires you to make peace with death.

Real rewilding, the kind that is an actual relationship with a piece of land, relies on death remaining visible. The dead perennial standing alone in January. The fallen leaves uncollected in the beds through December. The spent grass skeleton holding its shape in the frost. They are the mechanism of the ecosystem. They are where the overwintering insects live, where the birds feed, where next year's soil is being made.

Most clients do not know this when they say they want rewilding. They are imagining the high season version, always in bloom, always full. They have not yet considered that rewilding asks them to renegotiate their definition of clean. To find beauty in decomposition. If you cannot love it in January, you do not actually want a garden. You want a photo shoot.

The land does not need to be restored. It needs to be considered, designed for the best version of its current self, with a designer willing to follow its lead rather than impose a fantasy of its past. My client's creek knew. It knew the whole time. It was just waiting for someone to listen.