BOOKS

'Mending the Earth' passionate about natural landscaping

Jim Higgins
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Mending the Earth in Milwaukee," Ney Tait Fraser's book about natural landscaping in southeastern Wisconsin, is less a how-to guide and more a collection of conversion stories. Many homeowners profiled here met a person or saw a yard that started them on a path of learning and experimentation to creating a landscape of their own filled with native species.

Many of these stories include encounters with or reference the late Lorrie Otto, a Bayside woman who led the battle to ban the use of DDT in Wisconsin and who promoted natural landscaping. The not-for-profit organization she inspired, Wild Ones: Native Plants, Natural Landscapes, continues to offer resources and encouragement for people who want to restore native plants to their properties.

As Fraser tells it, Otto's journey to natural landscaping began with her love for an open field of wildflowers in Bayside. When 20 acres of rare Wisconsin plants were planned to be sold to pay for road repairs, she led a vigorous, successful lobbying campaign against that proposal.

Lorrie Otto, credited with being the "godmother of the natural landscaping movement" poses in 1999 in her Bayside prairie garden.

In enthusiastic detail, Fraser describes how Otto transformed her own property, replacing an asphalt driveway with open cell concrete blocks interlaced with silverweed, which absorbed rain and refilled aquifers. The more Otto studied flora, the more strongly she came to believe that restoring native plants, which had evolved symbiotically with local insects and birds, was necessary to heal the earth.

Nancy Aten's journey both echoes and intersects with Otto's. As a girl, Aten helped her parents plant trees and shrubs at their Franklin home, within walking distance of the nature center now called Franklin Woods. Aten became an engineer and married one, too. But inspired by an Otto talk and Wild Ones meetings, she turned her energy to gardening and landscaping design, even studying with an ecologically minded professor in Georgia for several years.

Fraser describes how Aten and her husband, Dan Collins, gradually transformed their property, learning from failures and mistakes, discovering the value to insect-eating birds of selectively retained dead trees, incorporating a pond that attracted regular visits from foxes and deer.

Fraser's villain is the manicured suburban lawn. In one of her gentler broadsides on the subject, Fraser writes: "The aesthetic of lawns is similar to the aesthetic of bound feet. Lawns hobble nature just as bound feet crippled women."

This self-published book can be bumpy for the casual reader. Fraser sometimes meanders. Occasionally, a sentence consists of a long list of native plants: likely a rapturous litany for people who know what they are, not yet one for me. The interlocking cast of mentors gives the book a clubby feeling. Fraser's experience and passion for the cause will carry readers attracted to natural landscaping past the rough spots.

Fraser, an artist, contributes many strong color photos. Even a concrete-bound reader can get a little giddy at close-ups of monarch and viceroy butterflies.

"Mending the Earth in Milwaukee" ($30) can be purchased at Woodland Pattern Book Center, 720 E. Locust St.; Schlitz Audubon Nature Center, 1111 E. Brown Deer Road, Bayside; Wehr Nature Center, 9701 W. College Ave., Franklin; and Riveredge Nature Center, 4458 County Highway Y, Saukville. 

Mending the Earth in Milwaukee. By Ney Tait Fraser. 180 pages. $30.