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Martha Schwartz

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Why you can trust SCMP
David Wilson

Who is she? Martha Schwartz is a New York-based landscape architect with as much pizzazz as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy planet designer Slartibartfast.

Does she have formal training? Yes, she is a Harvard design graduate.

Define her style. Wild and wacky with lashings of colour - she believes society has a hang-up about designs that embrace the spectrum. Another Schwartz hallmark is humour with a twist of surrealism.

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How does she express it? Consider her first solo design project, the Bagel Garden. In 1979, Schwartz dipped real bagels in yacht varnish before placing them on purple gravel around

the front yard of her Boston townhouse. Another outrageous Schwartz design - for the Rio Shopping Centre in Atlanta, Georgia - incorporates an

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army of 350 gilded frogs apparently worshipping a red geodesic dome.

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