GREEN SQUARE 2025

Sarah Price

For the 2025 edition, the symbolic heart of the event, Piazza Vecchia, will be reimagined by Sarah Price, the renowned British garden designer known for her deeply artistic vision.

Sarah Price is celebrated for her creative and sensitive approach to garden design.

With a background in fine arts and a deep love for wild and natural landscapes, her gardens have an immersive quality and are often described as “painterly.”
Sarah’s practice is distinctive for the breadth and scope of her work.

She co-designed the planting for the 2012 Olympic Gardens in London’s Queen Elizabeth Park, and since then has worked across various public and private projects.
Her designs have received numerous accolades, including three Main Avenue Gold Medals at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show: in 2023 for the “Benton End” garden by Nurture Landscapes; in 2018 for the M&G Investments garden; and in 2012 for The Telegraph garden.

Since founding her studio in 2006, Sarah has developed a garden-making methodology that places plants at the very center.

Over the past eight years, she has been experimenting in her own garden in Abergavenny, South Wales, developing drought-tolerant planting schemes using waste aggregates, slate, and sand, alongside habitats such as pools, marshes, and meadows.

Her approach to materials is equally innovative. Low-carbon materials – such as cement-free rammed earth walls, air-dried bricks, coppiced and woven hazel, and the reuse of unearthed pebbles or stones – are typical of Sarah’s richly textured, craft-based approach to garden construction.

Rethinking Urban Nature:

Lessons from the Great Renaissance Masters

In the paintings of the great Renaissance masters housed at the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo, fabrics become silent storytellers, conveying richly meaningful visual narratives. Velvets, silks, and brocades in vibrant hues fill the scenes: deep crimsons, regal blues, brilliant greens, and golden ochres transform fragments of everyday life into extraordinary tableaux, brimming with real-life detail.

Green Square 2025 draws direct inspiration from these masterpieces, bringing nature back to the heart of urban life. The project questions and overturns traditional notions of city order, inviting us to rediscover the subtle, intricate, and sometimes untamed beauty of natural systems. Woody outcrops of trunks, branches, flowers, and ornamental grasses are framed by brushstrokes of color that echo the rich tones of Renaissance paintings. The installation thus gives shape to an urban landscape that seamlessly blends aesthetics and ecological function.

In response to the ongoing decline of pollinators in urban environments, the garden designed for Piazza Vecchia follows a spatial complexity modeled on the dynamics of natural ecosystems. Logs and branches arranged along the edges of flower beds—an echo of the forests depicted by old masters—provide valuable habitat for invertebrates and help nourish the soil through natural decomposition.

Flowering plants offer nectar sources throughout the year, while the varied heights and densities of the greenery create microhabitats that support a rich urban biodiversity, from pollinating insects to birds.

With this intervention, Green Square becomes a living laboratory where beauty and biodiversity merge in harmonious balance.

The installation demonstrates that urban landscapes need not choose between aesthetics and ecological function—on the contrary, the two can enhance one another. Visitors are immersed in a space that enchants the eye with its painterly composition and engages the senses through the sounds, scents, and movement of a vibrant, industrious urban nature. In this place, the wisdom of the Renaissance masters inspires a new sense of environmental responsibility, giving life to a shared space where human experience is deeply intertwined with the living presence of wildlife.