A Landscape Designer’s Oak-Canopy Garden in Miami

Internationally renowned landscape designer and author Fernando Wong takes us through Shangri-La, a one-acre Miami, Florida garden he demolished and rebuilt entirely from the ground up in about eight months.

When Wong took on the project, the clients wanted rid of an existing kidney-shaped pool, and the garden itself was badly overgrown. The design took roughly six months, the installation the rest of a year. The greatest challenge was shade: the property is blanketed by a mature canopy of oak trees, so before anything could be planted, drainage had to be solved. A large gravel pit was engineered to let water from the roof percolate cleanly back into the water table, curing the mud that the dense canopy had left behind.

Wong, originally from Panama, brought a tropical love of lushness to a distinctly classical framework. He drew on French-inspired symmetry and strong center axes and lines of sight, laying sweeping porcelain pathways that draw the eye to a pavilion at the far end. He'll tell you he wanted visitors to feel enveloped by greenery that never leaves their side. The existing oaks became the design's inspiration, reinforced into what he calls a savannah garden — a nod to the live oaks of Savannah, Georgia — with fishtail palms around the perimeter for privacy and MacArthur palms whose canes evoke bamboo.

The hardscape is anchored by a dramatic 20-by-70-foot pool framed by two custom pavilions, one at each end. Wong's proudest element is those pavilions: sitting in one, he can look clear across the yard to a fountain, the palms, and the silhouette of the oaks beyond.

A pair of matching pagodas — built, surprisingly, from aluminum made to look like wood — sit in perfect symmetry across the water, their color chosen from between seven and nine greens tested against the surrounding foliage. The garden is layered with authentic antiques: an early-19th-century fountain from Provence, a 19th-century carved limestone fountain with a glass spout, and a bench and urns inherited from the homeowner, which Wong proudly reused. Multiple gathering areas — lawns, a trellis seating zone, an underwater pool ledge, and a spa facing the property's largest oak — make it a true family garden.

Wong's new book, The Young Man and the Tree, with a foreword by Martha Stewart, celebrates his tropical gardens across Palm Beach, Miami, and the Bahamas.