Among the names that have shaped contemporary Italian gardening, Paolo Pejrone’s stands apart. An architect, landscape designer and writer, he is often described as the best known of Italy’s living landscape architects — and his gardens, scattered across half of Europe, all carry the same signature: a restrained rigour, never contrived.
Training with Two Masters
Pejrone was born in Turin in 1941 and graduated in Architecture from his city’s Politecnico. In 1969 he moved to London, where he studied and worked alongside Russell Page, one of the most influential landscape architects of the 20th century. In the 1970s he was in Rio de Janeiro, in the studio of Roberto Burle Marx, the Brazilian landscape architect who reinvented the relationship between garden and tropical architecture. Two masters, two very different schools of thought, which Pejrone himself has called his most important influences.
An International Career
Since 1970 Pejrone has worked as a landscape architect in Italy, France, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, Greece, England and Germany, designing private and public gardens that combine his masters’ teachings with a distinctly Italian sensibility for agricultural landscape and spontaneous vegetation. He is also the author of several books: among them, In giardino non si è mai soli. Diario di un giardiniere curioso (published by Feltrinelli), which tells, season by season, what it means to him to live for a garden, plant by plant.
His Garden, on Our Journey
One of the gardens designed by Pejrone is at Tenuta La Torricella, in Porano, and is one of the stops on our Enchanting Manors and Gardens of Distinction tour, four days between Umbria and Tuscia dedicated to historic gardens and gardens of distinction alike, from 17 to 20 September.
