About

Marie Ruffier-Monet is a landscape designer and gardener from the south of France. With a patient sense of atmosphere and an incisively rational mind, Marie’s work is both soft and methodical, writ of poetry and clarity.

Originally building a career in Law, Marie decided to leave her doctorate program to claim her passions for plants, nature, and design.

Wanting to build her technical foundations, she studied botany, agronomy, topography and irrigation via a Brevet de technicien supérieur degree in Toulouse. She then moved to study design, its philosophies and its intruments, at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Paysage (ENSP) of Versailles.

Though a potential late-comer to the profession, Marie grew up the maître of two gardens in the mountains of Haut-Languedoc and the lowlands of Roussillon. The disparity of the settings, in climate and character, is likely part of what honed Marie’s sensitivity to atmosphere and her honesty of “place”. Indeed, she has continued to study the connections between locus and landscape in her ongoing international work.

As a member of the French Heritage Society, she has completed two placements in the United States, working in New Orleans and Philadelphia, and likewise at the gardens of Sparoza in Greece with the Mediterranean Garden Society. In all of her work and travels, she endeavors to understand what establishes location, colors the flora, and keeps our corners unique. She is continuing these investigations with her time at Pépinière Filippi as well as in her private projects.