Landscape designer Fernando Wong: I always start with a tree
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In her preface to landscape designer Fernando Wong’s first book, The Young Man and the Tree (Vendome Press), Martha Stewart recounts their first meeting on the TV show Clipped. It wasn’t about hairdressing. Both had been brought on as judges to “decide the fates of several topiary artists” in a shrub-shaping competition. She and Wong hit it off: “We spoke the same language,” she writes. “Serious gardener tongue, Fernando with a Spanish accent and I with my New Jersey/New York college-girl intonations.”
Having Stewart, the US queen of domestic arts, endorse Wong’s “fanciful and classical” designs only adds to a series of accolades for the Panama-born designer. He has made a reputation in Florida and the Bahamas with controlled and elegant gardens, including for the Four Seasons Palm Beach and Fort Lauderdale, the Firestone estate on Lake Worth, designed by architect John Volk, and Providence House, a pink beach house in the Bahamas.
These year-round gardens, in tropical rainforest and subtropical climates, are designed to cater for heavy rain and hurricanes as well as for intense and humid summer heat and milder, drier winters.
Wong finds great joy in plants: incorporating palms, hibiscus ficus hedges, drought-resistant zoysia grass lawns, with jasmine and bougainvillea framing doors and climbing walls. “I love to do green gardens — tone-on-tone green gardens — because you settle down and have a tea and see the sunlight reflecting back at you these beautiful shades of chartreuse, olive, emerald,” says Wong. “If, like me, you’re an early riser, you’ll notice how the dew on the grass shimmers at you.”
He is increasingly using native species, better able to cope with the local climate and exposed coastal locations. Then, he says, “the success of the project is more guaranteed”.
But he always starts with trees, whether duranta or banyan trees, retaining or transplanting existing specimens where possible: the right one can be a “beautiful sculpture”, he says, or a “wonderful focal point”, as well as benefiting insects. At the Firestone estate, pride of place is an existing kapok tree, brought there from the Bahamas in the 1800s. For one Miami property he worked with the architect to position a new French-style house so that as many oak trees as possible would be preserved. The trees were arranged to flank the driveway, framing views of the house and the water.
Wong’s designs incorporate rooms, or “experiences”, in which clients can swim, cook, relax, entertain and work in outdoor offices, “providing shelter not only from the sun but also sometimes from the rain. It’s about climate control,” he says. These designs, which reflect Wong’s architectural training with their adherence to classical rules of proportion, scale and layering of plantings, are a seamless, outdoor extension of the house.
The hard landscaping is a delight, featuring round pools, statues, formal fountains and, for one 1986 Regency-style Palm Beach house, a cross-hatched driveway where grass grows between its Greek key pattern border. For a Biscayne Bay property, he painted the house pink, adding coral-coloured stone walkways and Italian-style railings.
Wong’s holistic approach is evident in Providence House, his first project in the Bahamas, with a private beach on Clifton Bay. Buttonwood trees, coconut palms and sea grape trees were added along with native dune plants on the waterfront, while Wong worked with the architect to add a pool house and glass-walled breakfast room. But, ultimately, for him, the landscape is the real star: “With that view, how can you compete?” he says.
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