We visited Sitio Roberto Burle Marx two days ago and it was a fantastic experience to see the very different tropical plants work together and create the very typical tropic style environment. Roberto Burle Marx is the master landscape architect in Brazil, just like how famous Oscar Niemeyer in architecture field in this country. Sitio Roberto Burle Marx was his manor and working place and he collected about 3,500 species tropical plants to create his private landscape world.
As a person lives in temperate regions in the most of the time, I have never seen so many tropical plants and I can not name any of them. Roberto Burle Marx is a genius for using and collocating different plants to create various atmosphere. I was impressed by two things: scales and colors. There are so many species that it is a hard thing to well organize all of them but Marx used diverse plants with their various sizes of leaves and put them together to form textures and give different sense in different areas in his manor. Because of the diversity of the species, the colors of the vegetations are countless. Despite the showy colors of the flowers, the green colors of all the foliage are never the same. There are so many kinds of green colors as well as orange and yellow color and they all together create a colorful tropical worlds.
Yuli, I also enjoyed sitio Roberto Burle Marx! Like you, I was fascinated by the way that he used color to create pattern and variation. I was happy that we had already visited his landscapes at Flamenco park and the ministry of health and education building beforehand. It was helpful to be at least somewhat familiar with his work before seeing his home and studio. It was really neat to see him experimenting with different transitions between plant type. There were some areas that were so dense that it looked more like a natural forrest than a planned garden. I would’ve liked to explore his studio more to see overlap between those gardens and the other sites of his that we saw in Rio.
I was astounded to hear that there are over 6,500 plant species in his gardens. He has such a wide palette to draw from! I also didn’t know that Burle Marx discovered 20 different plant species. I think that his knowledge of botany and background in the fine arts gave him a unique perspective for landscape architecture. I was also interested to hear the tour guide tell us about his travels abroad in Europe and his knowledge of five languages. It made me consider the importance that having a broad range of experience has on the ability to work creativity. It seems that having rich cultural experiences to draw from would be incredibly beneficial to the design process.