FILBERT PRESS AUTHOR
Olivier Filippi
Nurseryman, ecologist and pioneer of dry-climate gardening
Olivier Filippi is a French nurseryman, ecologist and the author whose work has done more than almost any other to bring the plants and principles of Mediterranean dry gardening into mainstream horticulture. Filbert Press is the English-language publisher of his three landmark titles: The Dry Gardening Handbook, Planting Design for Dry Gardens and Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden.
Olivier grew up near Paris with no horticultural background, dropping out of a philosophy degree to travel and work seasonally across Europe. In the early 1980s he and his wife Clara settled near Mèze, on the edge of the Bassin de Thau in southern France, and founded Pépinière Filippi — a nursery now internationally renowned for its expertise in plants of dry-climate regions. Their conviction that gardens in southern Europe must be made for a future without irrigation predates the wider public conversation about climate change by decades.
For more than thirty years Olivier and Clara have undertaken botanical expeditions across the Mediterranean basin and the world's other Mediterranean-climate regions — California, Chile, the Cape, southern Australia — collecting, propagating and trialling species barely seen in cultivation. The nursery now grows over a thousand drought-tolerant taxa, many introduced to horticulture by the Filippis themselves, and their experimental garden at Mèze has become a working laboratory for alternatives to the lawn, the steppe fleurie and the terrasse végétale. Their plants supply award-winning gardens at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show and beyond, and their thinking informs a generation of designers including James and Helen Basson and Thomas Doxiadis.
Olivier is also a photographer and a sought-after lecturer who speaks to international audiences from Crete to California, with his books translated into multiple languages. The Dry Gardening Handbook received widespread critical acclaim on first publication in 2008 and remains the standard reference for the field; Planting Design for Dry Gardens won the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries' Award of Excellence in Gardening; Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden was named the most wonderful gardening book of the year by Mark Griffiths in Country Life. He has been profiled by Gardens Illustrated, the Garden Design Journal, The Mediterranean Garden and Pacific Horticulture, and two of his lectures for the Mediterranean Garden Society are hosted here on the Filbert Press site: Bringing the Mediterranean landscape into your garden and Alternatives to the lawn.
Olivier and Clara's nursery — with its catalogue, garden visits and propagation workshops — is online at jardin-sec.com.
Books by Olivier Filippi
