A quick detour into Brazilian botany, with apologies to the architecture fans. Brazil has more than 46,900 native species of plants, algae and fungi, with more than two-fifths found nowhere else on Earth. Across the Amazon rainforest, cerrado savanna, Atlantic Forest, Pantanal wetland, Caatinga scrub and Pampa grassland, the country’s plant life seems less like one national inheritance than several botanical worlds sharing a border. Roughly 10% of the world’s flora occurs in Brazil, and the country has more registered plant species than any other.

Pore through those thousands of species and, more than 50 times, one name appears in Latinized form: burle-marxii.

That would be Roberto Burle Marx. Despite having his name attached to a small botanical dynasty, he was not a formally trained botanist. He was, more consequentially for Brazilian design, a landscape architect with the instincts of a painter, plant collector and conservationist.

“In Brazil, we have Pelé in football, Niemeyer in architecture and Burle Marx in landscape,” says Fred Judice Araujo of boutique brokerage Judice & Araujo, where listing agent Patricia Judice is representing a $22.79 million Rio de Janeiro home shaped by one of Burle Marx’s last landscape designs.

Raised in Rio de Janeiro, Burle Marx understood the country’s abundance as both subject and material. The landscape trained his eye and shaped........

© Forbes