Lessons from Rewilding Landscapes… in the Wild

If all the technical widgetry works, this post will be published November 4 at the time it will be revealed as its own post on the Reclaim Open Conference, as my slot on the “Blog-a-thon” day. In the saturated metaphor nature of this post, consider this post having being rooted here but transplanted to the conference web site.

The conference theme of “Rewilding the Network” is an absolute appeal to me. Given the fill-in-the-blank-dystopic-adjective state of the “web” (I have grown fond of grimdark) you can find a good trail of calls to “rewild” the internet, to take it back from the corporate profit barons who seem to have sucked the soul of what many of us were called for in some past era of optimism.

It sounds great, right? What does it mean? In my own spirit of rewilding, gathering the elements from across the web land, I am old school tagging this stuff rewildingweb in pinboard. But I get ahead of myself. As usual in my blog format. My structure is… wild.

Strap yourself in for a long read, tons of photos, links, over extended metaphors, guaranteed typos, an ultra marathon effort for the blogathon.

I was going to write a whole long backstory how as a loner suburban kid I made wild landscaping a hobby, and carried on– but I already wrote that post! The key is taking it to a new level where I am now, a 16 acre rural property in Southern Saskatchewan. Surrounded by cultivated farm fields, my wife and I are taking on an experimental “wilding” project based some on discovering not far away, a very un-prairie like experimental forest started in the 1930s. We are doing that now.

Land, Love, Loving Land, and Letting go to Grow

My Pitch for Rewilding

My original, partly thought out idea for this “session by blog” was quickly slid into the web form months ago. Heck, I was still outside in my garden. This was the pitch

For me, a bit of the exuberance in “Rewilding the Internet” suggest a mob of people grabbing tools and going out to go about this act of rewilding. Drawing from personal experiences, completely informed of rewilding practices on land where I grew up in Maryland, to the deserts of Arizona, to now a 16 acre property in Saskatchewan, I suggest a few elements important to rewilding, metaphorically stretched to the land of the internet.

1. Rewilding is often not doing things, letting the land go and grow, giving space for it to do its own thing
2. Much of the ideas come from just walking around and noticing details, being aware of the conditions where you are
3. At the same time, weed pulling, pruning, trimming, maybe even chainsaws are necessary
4. Using hand tools can more rewarding/satisfying than power tools
5. Rewilding works by reclaiming found materials
6. You ought to get your hands dirty, push them into the soil
7. Rewilding is hard work over a long period
8. When the systems are working, you can generate growth by propagating from elsewhere in your land, not needing to buy plants from stores
9. Rewilding can be successful and sustainable but you learn via experiment/experience and also fail some along the way

Expect lots of pictures of real rewilding where my wife and I are turning a prairie into a forest! And maybe dogs romping in the wild.

I will stick to those elements, bend and mold them, and again, likely overreach in terms of making a comparison to web technology. You might have to wade through a lot of over explanation. And a few stories. It’s all ripe for breaking apart.

It’s my blog, even if it lives as a leaning fence post on the Reclaim Open web site!

The Stratum Below the Dark Forest

I do not have to outline how enpoopified the web has become. That’s well covered by a real writer. But this diagram in Maggie Appleton’s post, The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web, has lingered as an accurate depiction.

I dream of the wide open forest that I first came across in 1993 and was what I knew for the bulk fo my career since. It harkens back to the simple, naive? brilliant piece by Mike Calufield (hi Mike) The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – the gardens of then are largely abandoned, the streams either dried up, polluted, or just gurgling sewage flows now. The gardens are underground, and we swim through various cozy webs, dreaming of that damn one big social tent.

It’s worth noting the whole design approach of Maggie Appleton’s site as a digital garden, curated, tended, and free of pesticides.

But let’s get on to the rewilding and all the metaphors.

1. Rewilding is often not doing things, letting the land go and grow, giving space for it to do its own thing

The previous owner of our rural property warned us about the 11 hours it took him to cut all the grass. He did mow everything. Most of the fields were dry, cracked soil with scattered cut dead grass. Plus there were signs where they had driven snow mobiles trampling shrubs. The most transformation thing we have done is to not do something– to let the grass grow. Long. Longer roots improve the soil, it traps snow (melt) and moisture, and keeps the surface cool. Wild flowering clover and other flowers have been filling in. It happens on its own.

We have a slough in the back that was dug by original settlers. When we came here, it was a dry hole. In the bottom was a shooting target and bullet debris everywhere. Letting the grass grow enabled snow melt to stay, and we have a year round pond. We have ducks, geese, and… loud frogs! Where did the frogs come from? The willows on the side have spread and grown much taller. It teems with life.

I don’t have enough “before” photos, but this was last year, the old fence built by settlers has elmost been engulfed by grass.

Not cutting means also the poplar trees that line the edges of the property (sparse in many spots) are doing the rhizome thing. This photo below was the very first year, 2021. The tiny poplars that came up maybe 1 foot tall are now 12, 15 feet high. It’s like a free forest just building itself. That grass now is 3 feet high.

See a slightly different view of this area three years later, at four years later many of these offshoot trees are 10 feet high.

The thing about rewilding is how much is contextual- we have room here for more trees and welcome the spreading. In cities, the way poplars spread can almost be a nuisance. Back in June 2025, Laura Hilliger in “Roots and Rewilding” wrote about poplars in her urban garden areas being “the bane of my existence”:

Oh I loved the trees, don’t get me wrong. It took me over a decade to admit that something had to be done. Poplars shimmer in the wind. Poplars provide good trunks for hammocks. Poplars are trees for God’s sake. I hemmed and hawed about cutting down the poplars, the only trees on the north side of the yard. Every year I busted my ass trying to keep the poplar root systems contained. I tried, against the natural order of things, to build ecosystems amongst them. I tried to let them live their lives.

And then I admitted defeat and cut them down. For the project of rewilding what I could, I cut down the poplars. Cutting down a poplar tree, by the way, is not enough to get rid of the root system. The trees propagate vis a vie their roots and I, uneducated as I was in the habits of poplar trees, waited until they had spread across the entire yard so nothing else would grow amongst the thousand of little poplar trees trying to become a forest. I cut them down a decade too late.

[FBT] on Roots and Rewilding

Lessons for Web Rewilding

It mmight be a stretch, but there are definitely times where choosing not to create or intercede or toss a piece of technology is better, especially in a community. I remember many e3xperience where someone in my work ircle had asked a question, and maybe I did not get around to answering, but remember what a thrill it was when i got back to someone they said, “Oh I was able to figure it out.” This is always better.

Or I can also find a parallel from the days of teaching the DS206 Digital Storytelling course. Many media classes revolve around teaching using specific software, you end uop teaching software. In DS106 we never knew what students had available, so we suggested, say for graphics, to use Photoshop if they had access to it, but would offer suggestions to try say the open source GIMP or even web base visual editing tools. It was so freeing not teaching how to use software, but setting up students to identify what they had and then having to learn a bit on their own.

The tendency in our field is to rush in with technosolutions and “fix” things, when sometimes, maybe we should just let systems grow.

2. Much of the ideas come from just walking around and noticing details, being aware of the conditions where you are

The lessons I find in rewilding and letting things go is also appreciating what you have to work with from conditions. The climate. I see those happy gardening gurus in social media video in places where water often falls from the sky or the soil is is just lush and soft.

Well, this bit of land is extremely dry and not only that, we have winters that dip close to -40º (where Celsius and Fahrenheit meet) and summers that can peak near 40º. Rain happens, but is an event, and muh of our planting effort has to consider how to water. You pay close attention to the subtlest of land tilts, the prairie looks table flat, but our home actually sits on a small rise, maybe 15-20 feet higher than the elevation at the road.

Each weather year has been different. Some of the keys to summer growth is how much snow gathers in winter and melts. One year we acculumated snow drifts 18 feet high that in Spring melted, flooding some areas and filling our pond. Other winters we have gotten significantly less. Some summers have two or more months without rain, yet the summer of 2025 we had some precipitation almost every week from June through the end of July.

Our first year we actually hired an exploratory well dug to see if we had any aquifer water – nope. We considered a lot of irrigation ideas, but the most effective has been a small trailer we pull with a utility vehicle, it has a 100 gallon tank, a car battery to power a pump, even a solar panel used to recharge the battery. This has worked effectlvely to supplement water as needed.

We also had success this year with an area in hose reach of the water supply from the house with drip irrigation for new trees planted.

And we also just do a lot of noticing, a favorite activity is just walking the lands. watching for changes, noting what thrives, seeing patterns in what bushes spread, be it by root or seed. Or looking to see what happens when you transplant what is already thriving in the vicinity.

Along our gravel roads driving to our house, in the summer you see a lot of yellow flowers, brown-eyed susans, just growing wild, maybe just from the road runoff. They happen to be a favorite flower for my wife, Cori. Maybe 3 years ago, I stopped in July to cut some for her, but had no scissors or blade, so I just yanked a few out with their roots.

I ended up planting 4 of them in our front garden, which had been the first year, an ongoing battle with weeds. Well, they have spread and each year form a thick hedge of 4 foot flowers, which now I end up digging up in the Spring and transplanting elsewhere. A patch around our septic tank which again, previously was weeds, is now a lush flower garden, plus with wild violets and mint which have been showing up more and more each year.

A lot of our rewinding is just moving things around! You have to give them a little a water attention, but the local stuff is hardy. You dont have to buy all the plants!

Lessons for Web Rewilding

We don’t always need systems and vendors software! Why not see what smaller tools are thriving and in use where you do your own noticing. Or getting a better conceptual understanding how things like RSS feeds and APIs work so you can perhaps patch together your own approaches.

I have gotten so much mileage over my work years by a suite of my own JavaScript bookmarklets, some I have seen growing elsewhere and modified or learned how they make use of selected text on a web page.

Or practicing the lost art of view source to have an understanding what goes on in a web page (getting harder with all these fancy pants frameworks). Knowing how to clean up URLs or even change the variables in the parameter string to make them do something different.

Without this foundation, you could end up dependent on just whatever pops out of the machine when you type into a box.

3. At the same time, weed pulling, pruning, trimming, maybe even chainsaws are necessary

Not all that grows on your land is good! Let’s talk about weeds, which yes, philosophically, is just an unwanted flower. With our gree grass turf lawn at the family home, my Dad was relentless in digging out the dandelions. I have disdained them, though when visiting Barbara Ganley in Vermont years back, she made a strong case for appreciating their beauty.

On our 16 acres, I have given in that dandelions will be abundant in places, though from step 1, letting the grass grow long does much to crowd them out.

I can let dandelions go… but not russian thistle. They aer EVIL, sure seen on a hoke, the flowers are attractive, but they just dominate places they get a strong hold. They are spiky, and if not agressive on pulling, can dominate the vegetable garden.

I have a regular war going on with thistles, and I slowly get ahead by relentless pulling when I find them. In some cases, where they have gotten too thick, I have used spray to nuke them, but really, balltling weeds is best done long term by a regular practice of yanking them out.

Weeding is ongoing, from pulling out small ones before they get a foothold to wholesale clearing when they do.

Lessons for Web Rewilding

There are so many weeds on the web just a few are spammers, phishers, bugs in the code. There is constant weeding if you write in a blog and are crazy enough to have comments- the spam is always knocking at the door. We now have the invasive species of AI crawlers, who invited them in? Now we need to add fences?

Some weedings takes deliberate hand pulling, some do requite more powerful chemicals. But it comes with the territory, to desire for no web weeds is not recognizing the dual nature of humans where some that take any open opportunity to profit or abuse.

Amongst the weeds I find annoying these days are the infestation of ads, popups, and pay.subscription walls from seemingly every other click that get in the way of web interaction. But you can get some satisfaction by jumping paywalls.

4. Using hand tools can more rewarding/satisfying than power tools

Perhaps “rewarding/satisfying” is not the best reason, but I’d say doing the work yourself creates a closer connection to the process. Sure, if money was in large supply, we could have full sized trees brought in, hire backhoes to dig, and plop trees in. But the hand work, be it digging, clearing a garden bed, doing the spring time tree planting just feels good.

Each year we do massive tree planting starting in the spring. We take advantage of a program run by the SaskPower utility – the heat from an electric plant runs a greenhouse in Estevan, and we can put in requests as rural land owners for large numbers of trees and shrubs.

We’ve tried various methods. The first year we invited friends out to do a mass planting, we had marked numerous places with colored stakes (to identify the tree type) and had them use a “dibble bar” method of planting we had seen on a web video – mainly opening a pocket in the ground, inserting a saplig and pressing it closed.

It works well if you have soft ground! Many of those first year plantings did not make it. We have revised each year, and honestly found its best to do the work ourselves ;-). We had much more success last year with a method of clearing grass with a battery powered hedge trimmer, scraping with a pick axe, drilling with a portable battery powered auger– and yes, there are “power” tools at pay, so its not an universal rule. But the work is ours.

Maybe the most important thing we have learned is to put down a layer of straw as a mulch- it keeps moisture in, and our plantings surrounded by straw have done tehe best (we use this in our vegetable garden too).

Maybe our success last year, with numerous small surviving pines and poplars going into winter now, is this refined method. Or maybe it was better rain last summer. You just do not know for sure.

But the satisfaction of doing it yourself cannot be topped.

Lessons for Web Rewilding

This is the obvious call for using where you can, DIY web approaches, using open source tools, learning methods from others. And just doing much of the work yourself. It takes more time, effort, sweat. You try and fail, try again and get some success.

But web rewilding the web hinges on individuals, small groups, not companies, not even organizations all the time who may ot stay with the effort.

Digital Structures: Institutions Abandon / Individuals Preserve

5. Rewilding works by reclaiming found materials

Sure one can by fancy wood garden structures, perfect building stone, but there is more satisfaction here in using what is found on the land. We have used / reclaimed old lumber, barn board, piles of rocks, old cut wood, fallen tree limbs, the mulch that acccumulates below the establish shrubs.

The land ends up being full of both natural and human made materials. In 2021 I built a garden box for growing herbs using a pile of old exterior doors that were piled next to a shed, and covering with reclaimed barnwood.

Three years ago, during a relatively not cold December day, our family discovered a cache of buried bricks, likely 100 years old, under brush and even trees on en edge of the property. We have a fall tradition of going out and reclaiming the bricks (to be used for garden edging and and plans for some hill top setting areas, maybe path making?). Just two weeks ago, the four of us managed to pull some 450 out of the ground for future use.

And as a previous farming property, we always find remnants of old implements, rusty wheels, plows, even a former cart with one shredded tire left that we have pulled out and moved to a more visible display area. Not all rewilding is just growing, much is in making interesting visual displays (that maybe shrubs and flowers might grow around?)

Lessons for Web Rewilding

This lesson does not take much to spell out. My own web rewilding is based much on open sources / shared code found that others have shared, the methods and approaches to their own web work that are documented on blogs (cough, e.g. D’Arcy Norman still narrating his tech work). It’s as well taking advantage of open licensed media, attributing credit to the sharer, rather than just grabbing Generated garbage media.

Reclaiming the web is not just a rebel yell, it is maybe the most essential act to reinforce the entire system.

Using the “easy to grab” materials yields a “same as” style, plasticity, that lacks the human feel of old wood and rusted metal. Maybe not everyone’s flavor, but this is to me the most key rewilding web factor- heck it is the name of a respectable web enterprise 😉

6. You ought to get your hands dirty, push them into the soil

7. Rewilding is hard work over a long period

8. When the systems are working, you can generate growth by propagating from elsewhere in your land, not needing to buy plants from stores

In the interest of time and not making a 90 ton blog post, I admit these items have already been mentioned above. Getting the hands dirty is just the call for doing as much yourself, or at least coming to an understanding how things work, not accepting black box vending machine solutions.

It does call for dedication, and pretty often you might look beyond your own property / web sites and wonder why you are doing this when so much looks bright and shiny elsewhere.

Cori and I enjoyed a fantastic experiment last winter. On a snowy day we gathered a small bucket of closed pine cones. We brought them in, soaked in warm water, than let site a few days on a radiator.

They opened up and yielded scores of seeds. We planted them and grew our own saplings under grow lights. This year we planted about 80 of them, and are nurturing a few more for next year’s plantings.

That this is possible with found pine cones makes a suggestion to me what we can do with bits of web seeds.

9. Rewilding can be successful and sustainable but you learn via experiment/experience and also fail some along the way

Trying things and failing is such the norm. Our first year tree planting was not much of a success, and even having planted thousands of tree saplings over the last four years, maybe the success rate is not worth bragging about.

But going about now, and seeing trees getting near established where before there was cracked land, is just energizing. I get to take daily walks, and this autumn I have been able to send my wife during her teaching day, a regular “fine pine” photo

That these are establishing, where previously there was only cracked dirt, dried grass, and weeds, is remarkable. It suggests we can eventually have something, right here in the middle of the prairie, like the experimental forest that inspired us before we moved here. That we have been able to grow in our garden enough potatoes, onions, squash to go through the winter.

In the experiment department, from last year’s potatoes in the basement was 2 buckets of small rejects, that had grown long shoots over the winter. Rather than just discarding, on a whim this spring, we dug holes at the end of the garden, and buried them. They were not even on our irrigation line, but we harvested some of the best, giant red potatoes from there.

Experimentation and trying is at work all the time here, whether its ideas we pick up from online artlcles and videos, or just things we try ourselves.

Each year we put up some snow fence material in places to reduce the drifts from crossing our driveway. But we found in another area, a snow fence we put up near a structure cfreated a huge snow bank that covered one of our tree groves. All the trees and shrubs planted there benefited from the spring melt of a snow bank that was maybe 40 feet by 20 feet and 4 feet thick.

So this year we are putting more snow fence out in some of the fields to capture snow drifts into banks that might melt. We don’t know if it will work, and much depends on the wind patterns that change each year and each snow storm.

it’s really trying to mimic what we see happen naturally. Having perimeters or shelter belts of tall and thick shrubs (caragana and chokecherry, one introduced the other natural) has in some years trapped huge amounts of snow that just blows across open fields until it hits the barrier. Again, the spring melt of this has a huge transformational effect on our rewilding. Plus it makes for fun snow shoeing!

Lessons for Web Rewilding

I fel like I hardly need to make a case for the key role of experimenting and trying new things on the web. It’s too obvious. But it need not mean doing all hand coding and programming -there are so many ways to leverage web tools, services, integrations, clever spreadsheets, small hacks like bookmarklets, that go a long way.

I’d even say you cant do much web rewilding if you are not always experimenting.

And So What?

I had rather grand ambitions with my idea, yet feel somewhat like its just a long winded sprawl with lots of photos. How does one rewild the web? Doing it daily! Always with the curious mind! Again, look at this string of clichés that look generated.

Did I really cover anything here? If you are actually reading by this point, first I tip my hat, but also, I want to hear the critiques, the comments, the shared stories (be they of the web or of the land). Stories of amazing things to me are the soul of the web.

Still I assert the most important and interesting web rewilding is done by individuals. And why do it? I cannot underscore the feeling of small success, even if no one else really pays them much attention. Do the rewilding for yourself, to put a small stake in the land and say, I did this. Don;t look for popularity or clicks or attention. Do the rewilding because you can.

I close with a proud rewildied resident. This pine was planted maybe the first year, and almost lost for two years in the long grass. This summer it put on a growth burst now close to three feet high, with what looks like a durable “trunk”. It’s pretty much established.

But the joy was escalated when I went to examine and found it was holding two precious cones, such a rewarding things to see after just a short time. I expect one day to sit in its shade.

This can happen on the web too. Rewild or die!

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Featured Image: Composite of my own photo of the Mortlach Experimental Forest We Found a Forest flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0) and harvest wheat field flickr photo by gripped shared under a Creative Commons (BY 2.0) license making the combined image shared CC BY.