Biography:

Anna Scaravella is an Italian landscape architect. After a degree in forestry, she began her professional career working with Japanese architect Haruki Miyagjima in Brianza and later as a designer and works supervisor for an important Tuscan nursery. Over the years, she has designed gardens all over Italy, whilst the last phase of her career has seen her work on various international commissions from Paris to Lausanne, from Formentera to Kuala Lumpur.

Scaravella is also the author of several books. These include Creare un giardino, winner of the Grinzane Cavour Prize in 2007, and Tra giardino e paesaggio, a journey through the Italian landscape by way of ten of her most important gardens, which Rizzoli recently published in Italy and is due for release in English with Rizzoli New York in September 2025 with the title, Gardens and Landscapes: Ten Spaces of Beauty.

Philosophy:

Anna Scaravella’s main inspiration for designing her gardens has always been the Italian landscape, understood not only as a sum of its morphological, botanical, and climatic characteristics but also as a historical heritage shaped by human activity over the centuries.

Whilst her early designs present a more eclectic and “architectural” approach, the later production is characterised by a “naturalistic” turn, where mixed borders of grasses and hardy perennials—and often the wild prairie—take place side by side and integrate her beloved Mediterranean shrubs and trees.

This turn, however, represents the natural evolution of an approach that has always been site-specific, and whose implicit consequences are sustainability and low maintenance. Indeed, for Scaravella, a “sustainable” garden is one in which plants—native or exotic, it doesn’t matter—adapt well to the particular climate and soil.