The Sitio Roberto Burle Marx: A Case Study in the Garden as Scientific Laboratory or Vegetal Studio for a Moving Work of Art?

The garden is a place of experimentation, where gardeners try out plants and both see how they grow and explore how to use them to eff ect, but does that make the garden a ‘laboratory’? Roberio Dias (2008) has described the Sitio Roberto Burle Marx (Roberto Burle Marx personal garden and nursery outside Rio de Janeiro, Brazil) as a ‘landscape laboratory’. Using the Sitio as a case study and Dias’s 2008 essay as a point of departure, this paper asks, if a laboratory is ‘a room or building equipped for scientifi c experiments, research or teaching’, does the phrase ‘garden as laboratory’ accurately describe how the garden operates as a creative space? If it does not, what would be a more appropriate description? Considering the garden as an artist’s studio recognises that, even while science is involved in the process of growing plants, its aim is to cultivate plants for aesthetic purposes. If each plant is a test, and the tests interact ecologically, then the art produced in the garden as studio is of a radically diff erent type: a moving work of art. In reconceiving the garden as studio and its art as alive, I aim to help enrich theories of planting design to engage them with growth