O livier Filippi and his wife Clara run Pépinière Filippi on a windswept site overlooking the lagoons of the Étang du Thau, near Mèze in the south of France. Their nursery — established in the 1980s and built into a reference for Mediterranean horticulture — now holds a collection of some fifteen hundred species and varieties, and propagates around two hundred thousand plants a year for designers and gardeners working with drought.
Their understanding of those plants comes from the field: more than a hundred botanical trips across the Mediterranean basin, California, Chile, South Africa and Australia, observing how species behave in their native garrigue, maquis or matorral and translating that into propagation and planting protocols. Le Jardin Sec, the Filippis' own garden of gravel terraces and channelled rainfall, is itself an experiment — a long-running testing ground for how a Mediterranean garden might function without irrigation.
He is the author of The Dry Gardening Handbook, Planting Design for Dry Gardens and Bringing the Mediterranean into your Garden — three books that together amount to the working library of contemporary dry-climate horticulture. He is also a photographer and lectures widely to gardeners now planting into climates that, until recently, were the Mediterranean's alone.
