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.
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.
