Butterflies Aren’t Picky—We Are

Framing the Wild with Ecological Design

Nature on the Brink

The climate crisis is no longer a distant threat—it’s a reality we live with every day. Record-breaking flooding, increasingly lethal wildfires, and intensifying storms are reshaping landscapes and lives across the globe. These aren’t isolated events; they’re symptoms of a larger system out of balance—a changing climate driven by relentless human activity.

Addressing these challenges requires more than short-term fixes. In addition to policy changes at every level—policies that curtail harmful extraction and production practices—we need systems that actively restore and heal. Thoughtfully designed natural spaces are one of the most effective tools we have to combat climate change. They work by supporting pollinators and wildlife, improving air and water quality, and fostering well-being in the communities that interact with them.

But here’s where it gets tricky: these biodiverse, life-filled landscapes often clash with our current cultural norms of beauty. In many Western, industrialized societies, we’ve been conditioned to value neatness and control in our outdoor spaces—manicured lawns, trimmed hedges, and tidy flowerbeds. This isn’t universal. These biases are both cultural and historical, shaped by colonial ideals of order and reinforced by a biological tendency to distrust what feels untamed or unfamiliar. In other words—we can change this inherited mindset.

So how do we embrace these "messy" ecosystems—not just as acceptable, but as beautiful? How can we shift from rejecting functional, life-giving landscapes to celebrating them? By unpacking both our biological instincts and cultural conditioning, we can begin to design a new aesthetic: one that frames hope, resilience, and a thriving future.

The Fear of Wildness

Our cultural discomfort with "messy" landscapes isn’t a natural instinct—it’s the product of centuries of history and power dynamics. In Western thought, the concept of beauty was shaped by Enlightenment-era philosophies, like Immanuel Kant’s ideas of the sublime and the beautiful. The sublime—awe-inspiring, untamed nature—was something to be conquered or feared, while the beautiful was tied to order, control, and human touch. These ideals, rooted in European aristocracy, celebrated manicured estates and pastoral views—a far cry from the dynamic, untamed ecosystems that sustain life.

These aesthetic standards weren’t merely shared concepts—they were violently imposed through colonization across the Americas. The expansion of Manifest Destiny championed values rooted in European aristocracy and patriarchal colonial systems, prioritizing control, resource extraction, and domination over land and people. This racialized and gendered worldview not only erased Indigenous knowledge systems but actively perpetuated the genocide of Native people, who had cultivated a mutual relationship with the land for millennia. Instead, prairies were plowed, forests felled, and lawns cultivated as symbols of civility and control. Today, the dominance of the cut lawn reflects not just an aesthetic preference but the erasure of Indigenous and matriarchal traditions, and the ecological richness they upheld.

Image Caption: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, painted by German Romanticist artist Caspar David Friedrich in 1818.

Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames

The environmental movement emerged as a response to centuries of harm wrought by colonialism, industrialization, and unchecked development—forces that displaced Indigenous stewardship and devastated ecosystems. By the late 20th century, efforts to repair this damage gave rise to ecological restoration, a science-driven practice focused on healing landscapes. But this work often hit a cultural barrier: restoring wild spaces sometimes meant clashing with deeply ingrained aesthetic preferences shaped by colonial ideals of order and control. It was within this context that Joan Nassauer published her pivotal essay, Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames, offering a path to align ecological restoration with human perceptions.

Nassauer’s insight was simple yet transformative: the key to making functional, biodiverse landscapes culturally acceptable is to design them with “cues to care.” These deliberate signals—mown paths, neat edges, or clusters of pollinator plants—communicate human intention and stewardship. By framing wildness within these orderly cues, Nassauer argued, we can bridge the gap between ecological necessity and cultural comfort. Her work wasn’t just about softening resistance to wild spaces; it was a call to design landscapes that foster resilience and connection, inspiring us to imagine a more harmonious future.

Pathways to Resilience

Nassauer’s framework has inspired a new generation of designers and thinkers, showing how ecological resilience and cultural acceptance can coexist. Piet Oudolf’s work, like the High Line in New York, demonstrates how dense, biodiverse plantings can thrive when framed by clean, intentional forms, helping cities manage stormwater and cool urban heat islands. Robin Wall Kimmerer—a Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass—bridges Indigenous stewardship traditions with ecological restoration, emphasizing reciprocity with the land as a path to resilience.

Thomas Rainer and Claudia West expand on these ideas in Planting in a Post-Wild World, making ecological design accessible and actionable. Their layered approach combines “design” plants for visual impact with “functional” groundcovers that stabilize soil, manage water, and support biodiversity. By incorporating cues to care—like defined edges, pathways, and intentional groupings—they address cultural discomfort with untamed landscapes, framing nature’s “messiness” as purposeful. This approach transforms landscapes into bridges between ecological resilience and cultural renewal, showing us how to move beyond fear of the wild and connect more deeply with its beauty and function.

Image Caption: the High Line in NYC. Credit: Dean Janulis.

Embracing the Mess

Butterflies aren’t picky about where the milkweed grows—humans are. 

The solution isn’t to tame nature but to collaborate with it—because we too are part of this ecosystem. Wild, functional landscapes can be made culturally acceptable through thoughtful design and framing. By applying Nassauer’s principles, we’ve seen naturalistic landscapes flourish in cities and neighborhoods, proving that nature’s inherent messiness can coexist with human comfort and care.

When we embrace the processes of growth, entropy, and regeneration, we begin to repair the harm of the past and imagine a future where humans live in harmony with the natural world. Wildness doesn’t need to be tamed—it needs to be understood, celebrated, and framed as an essential part of our shared reality and resilience.