Jeremy Martin at BSLA Field Day 2026
Fieldday 2026 will take place on Friday, May 1 at the David Rubenstein Treehouse at Harvard University.
Fieldday is the annual conference for landscape architects and design and construction professionals across our region.
Rarely is the way to save a garden to move it. Yet for Roberto Burle Marx’s Cascade Garden, that was precisely the challenge facing the team behind ‘Longwood Reimagined’. This session explores the conceptual and technical challenges met to relocate a living work of landscape architecture while elevating its presence within Longwood’s collection of conservatory gardens.
Despite its modest footprint in a repurposed greenhouse at Longwood Gardens’ conservatory complex, Roberto Burle Marx’s Cascade Garden, his only extant garden commission in North America, was identified as a critical asset in Longwoods’ collection of gardens created by notable landscape architects. As part of ‘Longwood Reimagined’, the institution and its team of designers seized the opportunity to protect this landscape by rebuilding the garden —stone by stone, plant by plant— in a new location and in a modern greenhouse enclosure that provides the infrastructure to support its long-term health.
Panelists will discuss the innovative planning that led to a defensible preservation strategy, as well as the intensive technical documentation process required to carefully disassemble and reconstruct the garden using both original and contemporary construction methods within a new, state-of-the-art enclosure. The conversation will also address how modern accessibility standards were integrated without compromising the garden’s defining spatial and experiential qualities, and how the reimagined Cascade Garden now contributes to the broader fabric of landscapes within the core of the new West Conservatory complex.
Anita Berrizbeitia, FASLA, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Joshua D. Kiehl, AIA, John Milner Architects
Jeremy Martin, ASLA, Reed Hilderbrand
