Roberto Burle Marx (1909-1994)
- 3 February 2021
- London EMAP Publishing Limited 2021
In a 2010 interview, the long-time editor of Landscape Architecture Magazine Grady Clay was asked to describe some of landscape architecture’s greatest players of the 20th century. Clay said this about the Brazilian Modernist Roberto Burle Marx: ‘He was big physically and had a huge voice. He sang at parties. He could be heard in the back row no matter what he said.’ Clay was right. Burle Marx certainly knew how to throw a party – his dinners at his experimental nursery and garden estate in Guaratiba, on the western fringes of Rio de Janeiro, were legendary – more importantly, he knew how to make his voice heard.
The 150-acre (60-hectare) estate, Sítio Santo Antônio da Bica, was host to such international luminaries as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Walter Gropius, Margaret Mee and Elizabeth Bishop, but more importantly, it was home to Burle Marx’s extraordinary botanical collection of over 3,500 species of tropical plants collected from around Brazil. Purchased with his brother Guilherme Siegfried Burle Marx in 1949, the nursery would become his lifelong project, the nexus of his plant-collecting excursions throughout the various geographic regions of Brazil. Thirty-seven previously unidentified species were discovered on these ‘viagens de coleta’, and their scientific botanical names now include his Latinised name, ‘burle marxii’.