Jane Berger is a Washington, DC, landscape designer and publisher of www.GardenDesignOnline.com.

Photographer Roger Foley is based in Arlington, Virginia.

Miami landscape architect Raymond Jungles specializes in designing modern, tropical and subtropical gardens that perfectly complement nature. As Jungles puts it, “One of my gardens should look like it’s always been there. It just fits. It’s the right solution for the site, and that’s what I try to do.”

For a new property in the Florida Keys, Jungles was called in by architects Thomas E. Pope of Key West and Jeffrey Ryan of Houston to help a Texas real estate developer and his wife create a small vacation paradise. The pair wanted a home where the husband could pursue his passion for fishing and his wife could pursue her avid interest in gardening. Jungles recommended that the couple buy a waterfront lot next door to a garden he had designed some years earlier so the pair “would have the benefit of all the mature vegetation.” The selected one-and-a-half-acre property, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico on one side and Florida Bay on the other, was completely barren and only four and a half feet above sea level. 

Strict building regulations in the Keys control the amount of fill that can be added near the water line. To get the room for several terraced gardens and the depth needed for a swimming pool, Jungles knew he would need to raise the ground level by a considerable amount. Working with the architects, he persuaded them to push the main house to the back of the lot as far as possible. That allowed him to bring in crushed rock and soil to build up the front of the property and leave the rear portion at the shoreline alone.

 The architectural style of the home is traditional, with column-supported verandahs wrapping around the entire U-shaped structure. Jungles decided upon a gradual rise from the street to the house that allows for a generous-sized parking area, which has the feeling of a courtyard. From this space, a pair of columns planted with billowing bougainvillea vines establishes what he calls the “ceremonial front door” to terraced gardens in front of the house. 

Proceeding from the street to the house, the swimming pool, elevated on a terrace, appears to the left, surrounded by lush plantings. From the pool deck, there are views at every angle across the gardens and to the open water, yet this garden room is completely secluded from the street. To the right, a septic field is disguised as a lawn terrace. Views from the master bedroom suite overlook this grassy area, which is dominated by a striking bronze sculpture of an exuberant dancer posed against a background of tropical vegetation.

Jungles says the home’s formal layout called for an axial approach to the centrally located entrance, but he did not want to create an obvious straight shot up a huge set of stairs. Instead, he designed a series of terraced gardens in front of the house with some plantings grouped around lawns. “Unless you walk right across the grass,” he says, “you actually move to the left or right. It changes your perspective and you see the other gardens with their own spatial identity, but visually you have a clear axial relationship to the front door.” On paper, the arrangement looks like formal geometry, but in reality, it has a very informal feeling.

Jungles used mostly native plants to create his garden rooms. The chosen species are in perfect keeping with his design philosophy and with the site itself. “At least 50 percent of the site is what I’d call a recreated Florida Keys ecosystem with all the plants that would naturally grow in those areas,” he says, noting that the Keys have the richest biodiversity of any region in the United States. “There are more plants per acre in a natural Florida Keys hammock than anywhere else in the continental United States.”

Moreover, palm trees, bromeliads and native grasses can all withstand the salt spray, shallow soil levels and high winds that sweep across the property at times. “This project went through a few hurricanes just a couple of years ago,” says Jungles, “and it’s still looking very good.”

Not everything is native, but all the plants will grow in subtropical areas and many are unusual. There’s a white-flowering silk floss tree, a Satake palm from the Ryukyu Islands off Japan, a rare ficus tree, a Bailey’s palm from Cuba and a bromeliad from Brazil with chartreuse leaves and red flowers called Neoregelia McWilliamsii.

Boulders of indigenous stone serve as retaining walls to hold the soil in place, but they are artfully placed to look like naturally occurring rock formations. The pool deck is covered in local keystone, which is actually fossilized coral reef, and the stairs and pavers are made of a sedimentary rock called oolite.

The true artistry of this design finally becomes apparent at the back of the property. Here, the house, which is built into the slope and appears to be one level from the front, stretches to two stories where the raised verandah is only about 30 feet or so from the shoreline. The open porch overlooks the water below, and underneath it, ping pong tables are arranged on a large patio where the homeowners and their guests can just hang out in the shade.

It’s the perfect setting for people who like to be out on the open water. Much of the landscape from the verandah is hidden, apart from a few tall palm trees here and there. According to Jungles, the view at night is pitch black. “It feels like you’re floating,” he says, “just like you’re on a boat.”