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Residência Clemente Gomes

1973, Areias
Today: Fazenda Vargem Grande
Landscape architecture: Roberto Burle Marx
Associates: Haruyoshi Ono, José Tabacow

Burle Marx worked on the garden of his friend Clemente Gomes’s summer house over a long period of time. For Burle Marx, a garden is not complete when the designs are drawn and the garden is planted. The plants grow and change, and the people who care for them are part of an ongoing process of adaptation and development. Over time, Gomes and Burle Marx added many new specimens to the garden, doubling the original selection of 61 species.

On the street side, the garden is bordered by a house in colonial style. In the past, the site was used for coffee production. The channels originally built for washing the coffee and the terraces where the coffee beans were dried have been repurposed. Water is a central element of this garden. The upper levels, featuring pools planted with wetland flora, give way to tumbling waterfalls; the water flows down and collects in a swimming pool on the garden’s lowest level. For Burle Marx, who had himself received vocal training, the sound of a garden is an important element of its design. In an interview, he waxes rhapsodic about the baritone voices of frogs frolicking in the water basins. As a contrast to the element of water, there is also a dry garden with agaves and bromeliads plants growing on piled up rock formations. From the garden’s centre to its edges, the planting follows a clear principle, with palm and other trees arranged in homogenous groups at the garden’s outer edges. The interior of the garden is dominated by low-lying shrub varieties and herbaceous plants, so that nearly all of the plants in the garden are visible from its centre.