It's time to go wild

Photo by Marley Russell

In June 1862, a month after his death, The Atlantic published an essay by Henry David Thoreau titled “Walking, or the Wild”. It contains one of the writer’s most quoted, but misinterpreted lines:

“In wildness is the preservation of the world."

Many people make the mistake of substituting “wildness”, a quality, with “wilderness” a place. This is a problem because the idea of wilderness is largely a myth. In Australia, for example, “wilderness” was inhabited and managed by First Peoples for millennia prior to the arrival of Europeans. The idea that we should conserve wild places by declaring national parks and keeping humans to the tracks and the pit toilets is a colonial approach that, thankfully, is slowly being abandoned. Many Australians are recognising the long custodianship and ongoing legal rights of Indigenous owners.

Wildness is a state of being. It’s not my intent to unpack Thoreau’s concept in a quick newsletter, but I’ll say this: I’ve been thinking about these ideas for a while. I wrote an article about “rewilding” for Organic Gardener magazine back in 2020 and it’s taken me five years to get to the point I’m at now.

I’m ready to go wild. As a teenager I abandoned the Biblical idea of humans having dominion over the earth and today, thanks largely to the writings of people like Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass) and Richard Powers (The Overstory), I want to learn to co-partner with the land I inhabit to create a place where wildness becomes the defining quality.

To facilitate this I’m embarking on a new, year long project that involves something akin to “un-gardening”. If traditional gardening is about control and orchestration on the part of the gardener, I want to learn to relinquish, to ease my grip on the reins and allow the land to lead. I’ve battled this land at every step since arriving nearly a decade ago. I’ve tried to impose my will upon it, make it productive, but I now see the absurdity in that kind of approach and will instead spend twelve months cultivating a relationship more reciprocal than coercive.

For this project to work it needs an impetus, some kind of focus. With this in mind, I’m intending to enter the garden (or un-garden, maybe wilded garden…I’m still working out the terminology for all this) in Toowoomba’s 70-year-old, Chronicle Garden Competition in September 2026.

Frankly, it doesn’t bother me if the garden wins or not. I once judged a garden competition and know what kind of standard is expected but my primary reason for setting the competition as a goal is to help challenge ideas around what gardens are and aren’t, about how they relate to the broader landscape and can be reimagined for the climate altered present, and what is looming as a dangerous climate future. I want to do what I’ve always tried to do: Set an example. I’m prepared to put my neck out to do so.

The Toowoomba region is the most politically and socially conservative place in Australia. Many of this year’s competition gardens will look like they did in the 1950’s–hungry for water and fertiliser, pretty with flowering annuals and bowling green lawns. In Toowoomba, change is glacial. I’m not here to critique and put a big old downer on other gardeners and their efforts. I see where they’re coming from. Instead, this project is about challenging outdated mindsets and promoting ideas that are more open and experimental, less anachronistic.

I’m aiming to document the project in this newsletter and on social media (_justin.russell_ on Instagram and halfmoonfarmhampton on Facebook) starting on September 1. Feel free to jump on board if you haven’t already and share if you know someone who might be interested.

Thoreau also wrote briefly about wildness in Walden, his famous earlier work: “We need the tonic of wildness.”

The tonic.

I need it. You need it.

I hope you’ll join me in a Year of Wilding.