As an undergraduate, Pamela studied Environmental Design at the University of California, Los Angeles and went on to receive a Master of Architecture degree at UCLA. She started her own practice in 1975 in Santa Monica, where the company continues to flourish today. Influenced by Modernist and contemporary art, architecture, and landscape architectural history, Pamela has inspired a spirited design collaboration with many prominent architects and artists throughout her career.

Though her designs have received international and national recognition, she is most notably a prolific landscape architect of Southern California gardens. Her interest in and appreciation for a site’s cultural history and the symbolic nature of the built environment has guided her design practice and influences the firm’s work.

Her work has been featured in many books including Regional Landscape Architecture: Southern California Mediterranean Modern, Pocket Gardens, and Transforming the American Garden, as well as in Landscape Architecture magazine, Dwell, Garden Design, Process, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. 

In 2003, Pamela co-authored Private Landscapes: Modernist Gardens in Southern California, a book that profiles the suburban gardens designed by mid-century modernists Richard Neutra, Rudolph Schindler, and others.  In 2006, Pamela was selected as a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and in 2010, Princeton published Pamela Burton Landscapes, which focuses on the interrelationships and crossovers between twenty of her private and public projects. 

In 2018, Pamela received a Modern Master Award for Excellence in Landscape Architecture from the Los Angeles Conservancy. Pamela was also the subject of The Cultural Landscape Foundation’s award-winning Pioneers of American Landscape Design Oral History Project in 2021, that documents and preserves first-hand archival insights into the thinking of pioneering landscape architects/educators. 

As a respected and experienced landscape architect, Pamela served on the Design Review Boards at the University of California, Santa Barbara, the University of California, Riverside and for the City of Santa Monica. She has taught and lectured on the significance of landscape and its relationship to art and architecture at many universities including the UCLA School of Architecture, the University of Southern California, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture.