Native Landscaping

Península de Maraú- Pumpkins & Croton volunteers from below our verandah

The landscaping and gardening my wife Susie has employed for 3 years near the beach on the Península is unusual- if not unique along the coast of Brazil. The major reason is foreshore vegetation is often peremptorily bulldozed to create house pads for new developments. The weaker, and at last declining reason: immigrant cultural baggage which has usually promoted use of plants and landscape styles imported from the "old country"- Portugal, Germany, Italy, England, etc.

The style, if we really must give it a name- natural, or indigenous species coastal tropical landscaping. Overused, these terms don't tell us a lot: What is NOT 'natural', can we say? But a reference to a worldclass icon of landscape gardening may help: Susie knew Roberto Burle Marx in Rio de Janeiro when we lived there the last 20 years of his life. From contact with him, a fellow Carioca or native of Rio, and his work throughout the city, her lifelong passion for gardening in Southern California, Western Australia and Costa Rica- found direction here in her own country.

The influence was not only Burle Marx's at-the-time ground breaking (no pun) proselytizing on behalf of Brazil's exuberant, indigenous species. It was the integration of a flourishing extant local ('wild') vegetation with carefully modulated human life spaces. The idea, of course- blur the boundaries between design and nature, throughout the habitable area.

The botanical bases for this approach are two. The most unique is the Atlantic Tropical Rain Forest ('Mata Atlantica'), which today covers barely 5% of its pre colonization area. The other, the "Mata de Restinga"- in the vernacular, a sandspit vegetation. This often overlooked plant life crowds the foreshore and protects the dunal consolidation process in progress between beach and rain forest. A big reason why it is overlooked is because coastal development projects typically bulldoze it to make room for houses. That we know of, there are only one or two other individuals in Brazil who pursue natural regeneration of an extremely fragile tropical, coastal vegetation.

The continuum between the two includes a number of subspecies of giant bromeliads, 2 meters plus up in the air in the forest as as the ground, orchids, extremely attractive palm like bushes, tiny flowers. When we found the place over 3 years ago, it was a much different story. Absolutely blanketed with vines suppressing the native vegetation, blocking the light- we eventually got rid of it. The third component which merges with the native vegetation is a 100 year old coconut plantation.

The three life systems do very well together, thank you very much!