Three of Palm Beach’s most recognized landscape designers came together for The Society of the Four Arts final lecture of the season, titled “Legends of Landscape.”
Sharing the stage with author and interior designer David Netto, who moderated of the April 22 panel, were Fernando Wong, Mario Nievera and Jorge Sanchez. The trio discussed notable projects — many in Palm Beach — from their combined 100 years of work.
In the case of Sanchez, those works included Pan’s Garden, the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach’s all-native garden that showcases Florida’s wetland and upland flora.
Completed in 1994, the half-acre garden at the corner of Hibiscus and Chilean avenues, was one of Sanchez’s first projects in Palm Beach. His involvement came thanks to a foundation member, the late Lydia Mann, who purchased the land near the foundation and donated it to the organization with a handful of conditions.
One of those conditions was that Sanchez serve as the garden’s landscape designer.
It was a happy accident, Sanchez said, noting that Mann had been among his first clients.
“So, I was very fortunate,” the award-winning landscape designer said during the panel hosted at the Dixon Education Building.
The board wanted the garden to be used as part of its educational programs and the design to be a “xeriscape,” that is, with foliage that would require minimal upkeep and watering.
“I convinced the board to take it up a notch and make it a native garden,” Sanchez said.
Little did Sanchez know that his design marked Florida’s first-ever garden featuring nothing but native flora.
“The design came with the thought of what Palm Beach could have looked like when the first Europeans came to this neck of the woods,” he said.
Since then, Sanchez and his firm, SMI Landscape Architecture, have won multiple awards, including the Arther Ross Award for Landscape Architecture in 2010, 2014 and 2019.
Nievera, president of Nievera Williams Design, spent a portion of his time on stage breaking down the elements of the outdoor space he designed for historic Villa Artemis, 656 N. Ocean Blvd., in Palm Beach. It’s a landscape that garnered him the Preservation Foundation’s 2014 Lesly S. Smith Landscape Award.
The project was especially notable because of the amount of research required to restore the landscape made famous by the late photographer Slim Aarons’ photos of Palm Beach socialite C.Z Guest, Nievera said. He added that his research amounted to a metaphorical excavation.
“So, (the project) was really all about his painstaking archaeological dig of making sure … it looked exactly like it did, except for the plants,” he said.
Those new additions included tropical-climate-friendly plants to replace the estate’s Australian Pine hedges, as well as a few cocoanut palms planted along the yard’s eastern edge that serve to emphasize the view of the Atlantic Ocean.
Nievera noted that while obstructing the view might seem counterintuitive, the palm trees frame the vista and emphasize the Atlantic’s deep-blue hue.
“When there were no palm trees in the (Slim Aarons) pictures, you actually have no sense of” distance without them, he noted.
During Wong’s talk on the panel, he highlighted the major landscape renovations the firm he cofounded, Fernando Wong Outdoor Living Design, completed at 1230 S. Ocean Blvd.
Among the landscape’s most striking features is the grass-and-concrete lattice design featured on the driveway at the estate’s entrance.
The design, meant to introduce some green to the large concrete driveway, features a combination of real and artificial grass, Wong noted. The design’s straight green lines were planted with live vegetation, while the outer pattern was done with artificial turf, he told the crowd.
Another noteworthy feature of the landscape design by Wong — a former host of the television show “Clipped” — is the backyard’s water features. From a fountain near the yard’s rear wall, water flows via a runnel through the green space to another fountain surrounded by flowers.
Ever a fan of water installations, Wong said those features allow the garden to “sing,” both visually through the water’s interplay with the flora, but also through the soft sounds it makes as it flows.
But Wong, who has won several Addison Mizner Awards from the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art, tempered his endorsement of water installations, noting that they often are high maintenance features.
Even with the maintenance concerns, Wong encouraged audience members interested in adding a fountain to their property to “take the plunge — do your fountains.”
Diego Diaz Lasa is a journalist at the Palm Beach Daily News, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at dlasa@pbdailynews.com.
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Daily News: Four Arts hosts panel of Palm Beach landscape-design ‘legends’
Reporting by Diego Diaz Lasa, Palm Beach Daily News / Palm Beach Daily News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
