Taking Latin lessons

Roberto Burle Marx's garden outside Rio de Janeiro.

What with the World Cup this June, followed by the Olympics in 2016, Brazil has become something of a mega-sporting-event hotspot. Intermittent economic crises notwithstanding, we are talking billion-dollar stadiums, arenas and highways. Less, however, is being said about the planting plans. While horticulturists spent years perfecting the wildflower meadows that stretched around London's Olympic Park in 2012, it is still unclear what spectators will find growing in Rio de Janeiro.

Brazilian gardens, though - and South American gardens, generally - are increasingly in the spotlight. A string of South American designers have visited Melbourne in recent years to speak about the landscapes they are fashioning in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, while last year's Melbourne Food and Wine Festival featured a South American-style coffee plantation at Southbank.

And then there is a 2006 book, New Brazilian Gardens: The Legacy of Burle Marx, that has just been reprinted and released in Australia as a paperback. By Roberto Silva - a landscape architect who divides his time between London and Brazil - the book is full of pictures of gardens with oversized leaves, diverse textures and bold colours. It shows how luxuriant drifts of plants and expanses of water can be used to accentuate all manner of natural topographies in a similar vein to what Roberto Burle Marx began doing in the 1930s.

Both a modernist and a conservationist, Burle Marx used the native Brazilian flora he had come across while studying painting in Germany to create great curvilinear landscapes that read as abstract paintings as much as gardens. He was - in the words of Warwick Forge, who has been taking Australian garden tours to South America for almost 10 years - a "game-changer".

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Burle Marx has been cited as an influence by most of the South American designers who have spoken at the Australian Landscape Conference - a biennial event held in Melbourne and also run by Forge - with the Brazilian's aesthetic also fitting our growing penchant for the climatically appropriate.

While South American gardens span tropical, temperate, arid and cold regions, the celebrated Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm told last year's conference that the key to good garden design was to understand the order of the natural local landscape. "It's important to observe how plants relate to each other in the wild and then forge a dialogue between the natural and architectural elements of a site," he said.

Chilean landscape architect Juan Grimm's Los Vilos garden.

On Grimm's own property overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Los Vilos (a place similar to the Victorian coast in its ruggedness), he has coaxed an array of indigenous plants to creep, intermingle and dissolve into the wider landscape as if they have always been there. He has also thrown into the mix an overtly designed, perfectly circular swimming pool.

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Taking Latin lessons