Can nature—in all its unruly wildness—be an integral part of creative landscape design? With beautiful images, award-winning designer Margie Ruddick urges us to look beyond the rules often imposed by both landscaping convention and sustainability checklists. Instead, she offers a set of principles for a more creative and intuitive approach that challenges the entrenched belief that natural processes cannot complement high-level landscape design.

On Thursday, October 20 at 7 pm in the Weld Hill Research Building, 1300 Centre Street in Roslindale, Ruddick will explain the five fundamental strategies she employs, often in combination, to give life, beauty, and meaning to landscapes. Drawing on her own projects—from New York City’s Queens Plaza, formerly a concrete jungle of traffic, to a desertscape backyard in Baja, California, to the Living Water Park in Chengdu, China—she offers guidance on creating beautiful, healthy landscapes that successfully reconnect people with larger natural systems. Ruddick stretches the boundaries of landscape design, offering a set of broader, more flexible strategies and practical examples that allow for the unexpected exuberance of nature to be a welcome part of our gardens, parks, backyards, and cities.

Fee: Free Arboretum members and students; $10 nonmember. Register at my.arboretum.harvard.edu or call 617-384-5277.