The Villa Mandaçaia project has changed dramatically over time. It began as a vegetable garden, created for the hundreds of plant species that the artist João Machado – a botanist in his spare time – used to collect as a hobby. João, who is also the son of the famous Brazilian painter Juarez Machado, grew up amid the canvases and brushes of his father’s workshop in Paris and in the lavender and sunflower fields of southern France. During other vacations, he would visit Brazil and, eventually, decided to buy a piece of land in the mountains and establish a garden with more than 400 of the plant species he’d collected from around the world.
When he found this sunny piece of land, bisected by a river, at an altitude of more than 1,000m in Visconde de Mauá, a village in the Serra da Mantiqueira – between Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais and São Paulo – he wasted no time: this was the ideal place to put his dream of seeing his garden bloom into practice. “I started by spreading the seedlings and positioning my sculptures, designing an organic path,” he says.
