by Isabel Duprat

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This house laid on the pathway of my childhood. I used to walk alone from the beginning of Groenlândia Street to the Paulistano Club. It was a dazzle seeing the azaleas coloring the gardens in Winter like fuchsia and salmon real flower walls. I always wondered what was behind those walls and fences, not as tall and ostentatious as now and that is why we could glimpse and work on our imagination.

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This is a house from the late 1930s attributed to R. M. Harding. It had a Spanish accent in an eclectic mix of the neighborhood houses. 

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​The client wanted a garden with lots of flowers, light and cheerful. There was good insolation to receive the plants as well as shady areas provided by large trees that already inhabited the property.

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I made a garden that somehow paid homage to the gardens of that time and the appealing sites they created, reclaiming the spaces of the old Jardim América, designed as an English garden city. A time when dried leaves were still accepted in the garden as an effect of the natural cycle of the seasons. 

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I promptly sought inspiration from Gertrude Jekyll, who practiced the magic of using flowers and their colors without any fear and who with great talent introduced the idea of the pictorial garden in the early nineteenth century. Using a rich color palette that transformed them into juxtaposed color patches, she worked her gardens as works of art, bringing joy and liveliness by associating chromatic hues of flowers with the serioueness of English parks. ​

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I found in the perennial flowers adapted to the climate of this city the repertoire for the large flowerbed around the lawn. Next to the iron fence that surrounds the property, clusters of also flowering shrubs that, make up a second layer that, meeting some trees in the garden which in turn, join the trees in the street, ensuring a thick, vigorous and fluid closure as also intended in this garden.​

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