Entropy, or a lack of predictability in a system tending toward disorder, offers landscape designers a process-based approach to the design of outdoor spaces, especially landscape gardens. A series of landscape projects illustrates various aesthetic solutions using this approach. Natural succession initiates predictably unpredictable environmental processes, exotic and invasive species challenge controls imposed by designers, efforts to restore nature create disorderly processes, and the natural hierarchies of plant communities impose order that usurps the hegemony of predictable garden design. Resultant normalization of unpredictable aesthetic outcomes frees landscape designers and gardeners to challenge the aesthetic status quo and create a kaleidoscope of environmental processes in action.

John L. Harper is a registered landscape architect in the Province of Manitoba, Canada. He teaches environmental design courses at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg where he also maintains a small design practice. John received a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Georgia in 1996 before teaching in the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge from 2001-2006. His design work and writing have appeared in Fine Gardening, the LSU School of Architecture journal Batture, and on HGTV. In addition to gardening, John enjoys painting in his free time.