BY JENNIFER REUT

A botanical exhibition brings visitors into Roberto Burle Marx’s oeuvre.

FROM THE AUGUST 2019 ISSUE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE MAGAZINE.

So often seen only in plan or aerial photography, Roberto Burle Marx’s work can be hard to understand as spaces to occupy. With the possible exception of Biscayne Boulevard, executed after his death, the experience of being in a Burle Marx design remains out of reach for most U.S. admirers. And the images we do have, though captivating, are empty of the sensorial qualities essential to his work. Raymond Jungles, FASLA, a Florida-based landscape architect who often visited Burle Marx in his native Brazil when he was alive, observes, “It’s one thing to see photos; it’s another thing to move through the space.”

This summer, Jungles, who since his mid-20s was a protégé and friend of Burle Marx, designed what the New York Botanical Garden describes as a botanical exhibition “inspired by Roberto Burle Marx’s landscape designs and plant explorations.” The garden is on a small site next to the tinkly Victorian glass-domed Enid A. Haupt Conservatory, a factor Jungles says he took into account when thinking about movement through the site and the contrast with his very modern garden and its dense, vibrant plantings. The garden, made as part of Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx, employs many signature elements that landscape architects will recognize from Burle Marx’s oeuvre: swaths of the Brazilian natives he championed, a sculptural wall that references his dramatic backdrop at the Banco Safra in São Paulo, and the contrasting curvilinear paving that is instantly recognizable as a Burle Marx gesture.

Raymond Jungles’s drawing for the garden “inspired by Roberto Burle Marx.” Image courtesy Raymond Jungles, Inc.

It’s rare to have an interpretation of a landscape architect’s work in living materials—usually we must make do with drawings and photographs. The risk of failure, or just being uninteresting, is high. Yet, the garden doesn’t feel like a pastiche or an homage, but more like a paraphrase—authentic to Burle Marx and fresh at the same time. It succeeds as both a stand-alone design and as an immersion into what made Burle Marx’s work so exciting. “I used the knowledge I had for making [gardens] to give people the feeling I had,” Jungles says.

The garden exhibit is a way into the work, but also a brush with the personality that conceived it. “I want people to get to know him because he was spectacular. He was one of a kind.”

Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx runs through September 29, 2019, at the New York Botanical Garden, Bronx, New York.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Burle Marx’s name as “Robert.” It has since been corrected.