Burle Marx: oasis of beauty and knowledge.

• Author: Wyels, Joyce Gregory
• Position: Former house of landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx

With harmonious gardens and art treasures, the former home of this landscape architect is a fertile learning center for botanists and tourists

"One needs to surround oneself with objects of poetic emotion," Roberto Burle Marx was fond of saying. It was a quote he had borrowed from the architect Le Corbusier, but one the visionary landscape designer made his own as he filled his estate with collections of plants, paintings, sculpture, pottery, and religious art--the accumulated treasures of a long and creative life.

Now, four years after his death, Sitio Roberto Burle Marx is open to the public. Botanists and landscape architects journey to the horticultural oasis in Barra de Guaratiba, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to view its comprehensive plant collections. At once a laboratory and an exhibit space, the one-hundred-acre estate displays more than thirty-five hundred tropical and semitropical plant species in its greenhouses and gardens. Even ordinary plant lovers come to admire the myriad varieties of bromeliads and heliconia plus 250 species of palms. Among the latter is a specimen from Ceylon that blooms once every seventy or eighty years; it flowered just before Burle Marx's death. Some three thousand specialized books on botany, architecture, and landscaping attract scholars to the study center.

It is exactly as Burle Marx would have wished it. In 1985, while continuing to live at the Sitio, he deeded the property to the federal government in trust for posterity. His dream was to establish a school for landscape architects and botanists and to open the site to the visiting public, thus avoiding subdivision of the property after his death and ensuring that his collections would remain intact.

If a visitor's first views of the landscape evoke a sense of deja vu, there is a simple explanation. The features that make the Sitio so visually pleasing recall elements of the magnificent parks and gardens that Burle Marx designed throughout Brazil and beyond. From Rio's three-hundred-acre Flamengo Park to smaller gems across five continents, Burle Marx stamped hundreds of gardens with his bold signature. So pervasive is his influence that the American Institute of Architects proclaimed Burle Marx "the real creator of the modern garden."

In the Sitio as elsewhere, water plants float on tranquil pools; delicate blooms are juxtaposed with granite slabs; rounded river stones contrast with slender vertical leaves; walls extending from buildings provide a backdrop for epiphytes; and massed plants of a single species create grand sweeps of color. Of all Burle Marx's garden innovations, perhaps the most universally adopted is the use of lush tropical foliage like that found in his homeland.

Such was not always the case. Before Burle Marx waged his one-man campaign to create gardens in harmony with their surroundings, European design dominated Brazilian gardens as surely as Portuguese elements infused Brazil's architecture. Formality was the norm, with symmetrical boxwood hedges maintaining order, and straight paths slicing through beds of nonnative blooms such as roses, carnations, dahlias, and chrysanthemums.

Ironically, it was a trip to Germany that first opened the young Burle Marx's eyes to the design possibilities of tropical plants. At age eighteen, encountering some problems with his vision, he departed for Germany to consult an ophthalmologist. For the next two years he studied painting and music in Berlin. On weekends he visited the Dahlem Botanical Gardens, where the sight of rare Brazilian plants struck him as an...