Pamela Anderson’s Renaissance Started in Her Home Garden: “That’s Where I Found Myself Again”

In recent years, Pamela Anderson has proven herself a true renaissance woman. After earning some well-deserved praise (and award nominations) for her star turn in Gia Coppola’s 2024 drama, The Last Showgirl, Anderson released I Love You, a vegan cookbook that allowed the actor—a veteran cook—to share her family’s favorite recipes with the world. Much of the inspiration for the latter project stemmed from her garden, an expansive spread on her family’s long-held Vancouver Island plot. The Baywatch icon bought the estate from her grandparents 30 years ago.

Today, the seven-acre property known as Arcady (“It means peaceful, rustic place,” Anderson explains) is home to fragrant roses, ground cherries, all sorts of melons, and much more. It’s also where her parents first lived after they married, and where her sons Brandon and Dylan took their first steps as babies. For Anderson herself, Arcady is “where everything came back together for me. This whole new chapter? It started in the garden,” she tells AD.

We caught up with the actor over Zoom while she was in London doing press for her new film Naked Gun, which hits theaters August 1. She’ll also be on stage in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, at this summer’s Williamstown Theatre Festival in the Berkshires. Below, Anderson shares her favorite gardening tools, how her sons have been instrumental in the creation of the space, and the famed gardens from which she draws inspiration.

Anderson’s hat, perfect for sunny days spent planting, belonged to her grandfather. “I found this hat in the basement. I remember showing my dad and he was like, ‘That’s grandpa’s hat!’ So I cleaned it up and I wear it every once in a while. I love it.”

Architectural Digest: You’ve been interested in gardening since you were very young. How did your passion for it begin?

Pamela Anderson: It started when I realized you could just eat blackberries off a bush or a crabapple in a tree. It was one of those aha moments, that food comes from the ground, comes from the earth. And I realized, Oh, I can have my own garden. When I moved home to restart [around the outset of the pandemic], I instantly thought, I’m going to make an incredible garden. The garden is such a metaphor: You can replant your garden every year, rotate your crops. I started learning a lot about it and thought, This is how I want my life to be.

And this is now your garden’s seventh season? How has it changed over the years?

I’ve had it every which way. It was smaller; I expanded it. I had to put deer fencing around, so my sons got involved and we designed this huge garden. It was so much bigger than I thought it was going to be! We get to feed a lot of food banks, soup kitchens, churches, neighbors, and family and friends.

Anderson’s sons helped her redesign the garden. New additions included adding in deer fencing and plenty of trellises.

What are you harvesting right now?

Beets, radishes, lettuces. It’s fun. My mom is sending me pictures because I’m out on the road. And I’m going, “Oh gosh, I wish I was there!” It’s been so nice to bring my parents onto the property. I renovated and moved them into one of the cabins—[the same one] where they were married, where they started out. It was kind of my evil plan all along when I bought this property from my grandmother. I knew that one day I would bring my parents back and be as close to them as I could in their elder years when they needed me—without being too close.

The garden is such a metaphor: You can replant your garden every year, rotate your crops. I started learning a lot about it and thought, “This is how I want my life to be.”

Pamela Anderson

And the garden is a multigenerational affair?

Both of my sons are very good at gardening, but Brandon has taken it to another level, of course. He does the drawings and the graphs and the grids and the arrows and writes the Latin names of plants. He’s so helpful. He does a lot of our friends’ gardens. He’s designing one right now in Malibu. And Dylan, he’s just got the cool factor. He knows when things look good and peaceful and right.

“We put in huge vegetable boxes,” Anderson says of her garden layout. “There’s about 15,000 square feet of vegetables now.”

Where else do you get your garden knowledge and inspiration from?

I love Monty Don, his videos, and books. I think he writes so beautifully and poetically when it comes to gardens. And I love the secret gardens, and musical gardens in Marie Antoinette’s [château] at Versailles. My kids really love Japanese gardening. They’ve been all over the world with their dad visiting the best bonsai places. All of us in our family share the same love, but different styles. I’m a romantic gardener. I don’t like straight lines. If you see any straight lines in my garden, it’s because somebody else probably planted it.

What style is your garden?

I think “Provençal” is how I love to think of it. It’s wildflowers and herbs and vegetables mixed in. I’m combining the rules of gardening and then more of my whimsical nature.

“You need great boots for gardening. Hunter boots—have to have those!” Anderson says.

What are your go-to tools for realizing your vision?

I have so many gardening tools, but I love this company Gardenheir. I get a lot of gifts from my son there. Some things are just from the hardware store. I have lots of clippers and keep them in all the cabins. But I need to make gardening gloves, I think, because you go through them so fast.

This is probably like picking your favorite child, but what are your favorite things you grow?

I love my Yves Piaget roses. I also harvest rose hips and make face oils and all sorts of beauty treatments out of them. And I love my heirloom tomatoes—I have that vegan cookbook I put out last year. A great heirloom tomato salad—that’s the perfect food.

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Pamela Anderson’s cookbook *I Love You* originated as a collection of recipes to get her sons started in their own first kitchens.

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Any tips for someone who’s super green—no pun intended—on starting their first garden?

Just make a lot of mistakes and try. Really, it’s soil, water, and sun. It’s the simplest thing.

The seven-acre property is on a bank with ocean views. “I love that I have the seasons and the snow. Vancouver Island is a rainforest, so the biodiversity is incredible.”

But it seems like you can grow anything on yours!

It’s very volcanic. It feels like an interesting vortex. Even my gardener says, “I don’t know what’s going on in this garden, but it’s so happy.” There’s just something about it—getting your hands dirty, even being barefoot in the garden—something about it connects me back to who I am. That’s where I found myself again, so it’s very special.