Sima Eliovson (1919–1990)

Three years before Burle Marx died at the age of 84, "The Garden of Roberto Burle Marx" was released, calling itself "the only authorized study of the life and work of one of the world's greatest living landscape architects." It was also the last book by garden writer Sima Eliovson, who died in 1990. The book has a short foreword by Robert Burle Marx and is full of drawings and photographs he made available for the book. The format is pretty straightforward, with two parts: "The man and his background," a good overview of his background and career; and "The gardens -- in approximate chronological order," presenting 25 of his hundreds of gardens, from the Sitio where he lived and worked to a garden on a farm for Clemente Gomes (a repeat client) in the late 1980s. Horticulturists will appreciate the first of two appendices, a list of plants mentioned in the text, while completists will like the second, a list of "significant landscape projects."… (mere)