Issue link: https://www.balharbourdigital.com/i/1480737
BAL HARBOUR 213 Jungles acquired some of those hands-on skills as a teenager. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, he was an outdoorsy kid who liked to hike, go camping and, until he discovered girls in adolescence, dreamed of being a mountain man and living off the land. By the time he was in high school, his family resided in Columbus, Ohio, and he got a part-time job at a nursery where he learned how to dig, ball and burlap trees. After graduation, he was on a crew clearing brush from railroad tracks with chainsaws and bush axes. Moving to Miami—a "sleepy" town when he arrived in 1974—he liked being close to the ocean and the Everglades. "I loved the green all year," he recalls. "The sky and the clouds are amazing." In between working as a landscape laborer and lifeguarding on the beach, he enrolled at a community college, and when he had to write a paper about a profession for a class, he picked landscape architecture. Soon he was getting his degree in it at the University of Florida at Gainesville. There, he learned about the Brazilian modernist Roberto Burle Marx, famed for landscapes with sinuous forms and masses of plants, and fell under his sway. When Burle Marx gave a lecture on campus, Jungles wrangled an invitation to visit the master at his home in Rio de Janeiro (now a UNESCO site). He would return there again and again to watch Burle Marx at work and accompany him on plant-finding expeditions. When Burle Marx came to Miami, he would stay with his young protégé, often visiting Jungles's job sites and making suggestions. At first, Jungles had a design-build firm, which meant he installed the gardens he designed. He wore "I HAVE THE HABIT OF IMPROVING WHEREVER I CAN. I'M A MAKER. I'M A DOER. I LIKE TO SEE THINGS BUILT."