D an Pearson OBE grew up in an Arts and Crafts house on the Hampshire–Sussex border with two artist parents. At seventeen he abandoned A-levels for a trainee place at RHS Garden Wisley, then a year at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in the rock and woodland gardens, then the three-year diploma at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Dan Pearson Studio has practised as a landscape and garden design office in London since 1987.
His work moves between scales — private gardens, public landscapes, five Chelsea Flower Show gardens — and is most associated with a generous, ecologically attentive use of perennials. With the Japanese head gardener Midori Shintani he has spent more than a decade developing the gardens of the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Hokkaido, a thousand-year conservation project on a scale unfamiliar to British practice, where contemporary naturalistic planting meets a long tradition of Japanese nature worship.
His own garden, Hillside, is a twenty-acre smallholding in Somerset that he tends with his partner Huw Morgan and uses as a testing ground for everything else. He writes weekly at Dig Delve and lectures widely on his work.
