Acting as a landscape architect for 45 years, the desire to express myself through a website came from a truly clear purpose.
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In my profession it was crucial to forge a path of discoveries with mistakes and successes, happy, fruitful and rewarding passages and, above all, full of learning, always with the certainty of much still to be unveiled and, yes, always with great courage.​
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In this space, I want to rescue this journey and share the processes, my thoughts on making gardens, the maturation of the projects I did, the new and the old ones, the expectations and the results, making my perception and respect for nature visible, the understanding the external space and the effective and fundamental contribution of the landscape architect to promote the value and integration of the architecture project with its surroundings and with the natural landscape.
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I want to praise the adventure of exercising the freedom to create that is fundamental to the art of making gardens, bringing the nature and the magic of its own time to our daily lives. It is a way to live in better places and thus become better people. ​
Spring, 2020
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I was born in the city of São Paulo in 1954, and here I have lived to this day, with an interval of three years in my childhood when, at that time, my father wanted to experience life in the peaceful interior of the state. The countryside, however, has always been part of our six brothers' lives.
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The intimacy and pleasure of sowing, planting and watching grow, especially trees, was cultivated and stimulated by my mother. I wanted to be a botanist in childhood and, in my teens, curiosity and a taste for architecture made landscaping a natural path, without the crises and uncertainties of which career to pursue. In 1978, I graduated from the Mackenzie School of Architecture and Urbanism, with much to discover. My background was privileged: an internship with Roberto Burle Marx, living and enjoying his vigorous knowledge and with expeditions in search of new plant species promoted by the botanist Nanuza de Menezes and her research group from USP, two very special and fundamental people in the my course. Spending six years in the Department of Parks and Green Areas of the City of São Paulo, dreaming of the beautiful gardens I came to know, I created a Garden History class at the Ibirapuera Park gardening school, participated in the creation of a municipal gardeners class for the preparation of specialized labor, so fundamental and, unfortunately, extinct, and together with the team of architects, I participated in projects in countless squares and parks for the city. There were good times in public work, which we no longer see today. ​
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In 1983, I set up my garden design and execution office and a plant shop in a lovely farmhouse in a central neighborhood of the city, which was passed to me by Mr. Fernando Silva, a knowledgeable Portuguese gardener with whom I learned a lot about plants and how we humbly always have something to learn from them. In this place, for 25 years, I had fun selling potted plants and making beautiful flower arrangements in a small colorful and fragrant shed.
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The shop and the farmhouse disappeared with the city's greediness, leaving full-blown my office, which moved elsewhere, and an invaluable experience of the whole process that involves my work until today.
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In 2002 my husband Manoel Dubeux Leão, musician and agricultural engineer, joined me bringing up a great contribution in the coordination of the garden execution works that we have designed.
