Dan Pearson on Gardens

It may be winter, but our eyes were on springtime and flower gardens this week as The Garden Conservancy and the 2011 San Francisco Flower and Garden Show welcomed Dan Pearson, England's masterful landscape designer, to the stage of the Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco.

Principal of Dan Pearson Studio in London, Pearson is also the author of two books including the soon-to-released Home Garden: Sanctuary in the City, a garden columnist for The Observer magazine, and the designer of five award-winning Chelsea Flower Show gardens.

Through images of two of his major installations - the therapeutic gardens at Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centre in London and The Tokachi Mainichi Millennium Forest, an 80-acre nature reserve in Hokkaido, Japan -  Pearson illustrated to the sold-out audience his bold painterly use of form, texture and color in plantings and a determined decision to collaborate, rather than dominate, nature.

Above images of  Maggie's Cancer Caring Centre

courtesy of Dan Pearson Studio

 Tokachi Millennium Forest

 Image by Syogo Oizumi

Tokachi Millennium Forest in winter

 

Above images courtesy of Dan Pearson Studio

But, before the British garden designer took the stage, he met with representatives of the evening's sponsors...

Kay Hamilton Estey of the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show, Dan Pearson, 

and Antonia Adezio and Betsy Flack of The Garden Conservancy 

before the presentation

... and two members of the audience from Marin.

Ive Haugeland and Jamie Morf

of Shades of Green Landscape Architecture in Sausalito

flank Dan Pearson