This heliconia species is names after the landscape designer Roberto Burle Marx who filled his estate with collections of plants, paintings, sculpture, pottery, and religious art, the accumulated treasures of a long and creative life.
Now Sitio Roberto Burle Marx is open to the public. Botanists and landscape architects journey to the horticultural oasis in Barra de Guaratiba, on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, to view its comprehensive plant collections. At once a laboratory and an exhibit space, the one-hundred-acre estate displays more than thirty-five hundred tropical and semitropical plant species in its greenhouses and gardens. Even ordinary plant lovers come to admire the myriad varieties of bromeliads and heliconia plus 250 species of palms. Among the latter is a specimen from Ceylon that blooms once every seventy or eighty years; it flowered just before Burle Marx's death. Some three thousand specialized books on botany, architecture, and landscaping attract scholars to the study center. It is exactly as Burle Marx would have wished it. In 1985, while continuing to live at the Sitio, he deeded the property to the federal government in trust for posterity. His dream was to establish a school for landscape architects and botanists and to open the site to the visiting public, thus avoiding subdivision of the property after his death and ensuring that his collections would remain intact.
(Wyels, J. G. Americas Magazine. 2001.)
(Information for this species compiled and recorded by Camelia Cirnaru, NTBG Consultant.)
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