A garden is a complex of aesthetic and plastic intentions; and the plant is, to a landscape artist, not only a plant - rare, unusual, ordinary or doomed to disappearance - but it is also a color, a shape, a volume or an arabesque in itself.

Now called Sítio Roberto Burle Marx under the direction of IPHAN-Instituto do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional / Ministério da Cultura it houses over 3500 species of plants. In 1932 Burle Marx designed his first landscape for a private residence by the architects Lucio Costa and Gregori Warchavchik. One of these was his professor Brazilian Modernism’s Lucio Costa the architect and planner who lived down the street from Burle.

Roberto Burle Marx (August 4 1909 – June 4 1994) was a Brazilian landscape architect (as well as a painter print maker ecologist naturalist artist and musician) whose designs of parks and gardens made him world famous. He was known as a modern nature artist and a public urban space designer.