He let the weed everyone was fighting take over. It grew into a forest, then died out on its own.

He let the weed everyone was fighting take over. It grew into a forest, then died out on its own.

In 1987, a botanist named Hugh Wilson looked at 109 hectares of exhausted hill country on New Zealand’s Banks Peninsula. Most of its old-growth forest had long since been cleared for grazing, and much of what remained was buried under gorse. He proposed doing essentially nothing about it. Gorse is a spiny European shrub with yellow flowers that New Zealand farmers have spent generations trying to eradicate. They burned it, sprayed it, bulldozed …