The Brazilian landscape artist and architect Roberto Burle Marx invented a cascade backyard to match a conservatory at Longwood Gardens. This is one of the few permanent examples of his own work at the US. The reconstruction will cost $6.5M. The job a part of a $250m project that intends to revitalize the sprawling botanical garden and historic Peirce-du Pont property in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania.
The garden is made up of hundreds of South American plants, vertical rock walls, waterfalls and reflecting pools, that is emptied under a stand-alone custom-designed glasshouse, retrofitted with contemporary fittings and heating cables. It is “a classic Burle Marx garden, embedded with the story of the rainforest and the plants that he was passionate about”, states Paul Redman, the president and chief executive of Longwood.
The renovation is being directed by the New York-based architectural design company Weiss/Manfredi along with the Massachusetts-based landscape architect Reed Hilderbrand. The movement of this piece is modulated by a panel of horticulturist so that to guarantee the safety of the tropical plants.
Burle Marx advocate for ecological preserving and wanted people to be aware of these plants and preserve them. Burle Marx’s backyard at Longwood was set up in 1992, but the artist had planted roots in Pennsylvania decades before. His US spouse, the landscape architect Conrad Hamerman, who’d worked with Burle Marx in Rio p Janeiro from the 1950s, was established in Philadelphia.
International recognition of Burle Marx’s function and influence as an artist, architect and environmental activist has skyrocketed in the last few decades, such as exhibitions at the New York Botanical Garden, and the Jewish Museum. Earlier this season, the property in Rio p Janeiro in which Burle Marx lived and worked for two or more decades—that he contributed to the Brazilian authorities upon his departure in 1994—reopened following a $1.4m renovation project started after the website has been nominated to be termed a Unesco World Heritage website in late 2018.