Christopher Schmidt

“Marvelous and somehow sad, flamboyant, and threatening .” The words are Elizabeth Bishop’s, writing in a letter to describe the extraordinary tropical plant life encountered at the Sítio Burle Marx, the hundred-acre home and nursery of Roberto Burle Marx, Brazil’s best-known landscape architect and a key figure in the country’s modernist movement. Although Bishop had already lived in Brazil for ten years when she wrote this, the Sítio Burle Marx, located on the western outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, was and continues to be an incomparably rich showcase for botanical exotica collected on the designer’s many scouting expeditions to remote Brazilian biomes (fig. 1). A polymath, “one of the real Brazilian geniuses” in Bishop’s words, Burle Marx was a celebrated painter, tapestry artist, and muralist ( Words in Air, 361). But it was as a landscape designer where his influence was most profound. From 1938 onward, when he contributed a garden for a Le Corbusier–designed building in downtown Rio de Janeiro, his designs and writings served as a persuasive argument for the use of indigenous rather than European plants. (To some, his gardens were a living embodiment of antropofagia, the Brazilian modernist turn to indigenous traditions, alongside a cannibalistic digestion of colonial influence.) He increased the amount of greenery in Brazilian cities and, beginning in the 1960s, advocated fiercely for the protection of the Amazon and other threatened biomes. On a formal level, his crucial innovation was to isolate and concentrate a few extravagant species of plant, pruning back the dense ecodiversity of the rain forest into an expressive, “artificial” style. Indeed, while Bishop is ostensibly describing the qualities of plants she encountered at the Sítio, her use of the word “flamboyant” points beyond them to the camp manner of the designer himself (fig. 2).