This Friday in Rio de Janeiro is the shortest day of the year, the start of a winter that, by New York standards at least, gets only a little bit nippy. Here, though, the hot days have arrived, and up in the Bronx, the sun-starved among us have all summer to immerse ourselves in a southern hemisphere Shangri-La.

“Brazilian Modern: The Living Art of Roberto Burle Marx” has taken over the New York Botanical Garden — and offers an exuberant gust of tropical modernism that will thrill anyone caught in the concrete jungle. Burle Marx, Brazil’s greatest landscape designer, hasn’t lacked for institutional attention lately; just three years ago the Jewish Museum presented a retrospective of his paintings, tapestries, jewelry and designs for green spaces and public thoroughfares in Rio, Brasília, and even Miami. But that show could not offer what this one does: a full-scale, fragrant, enchantingly lush garden, complete with numerous flowering plants and philodendrons that Burle Marx himself first identified.

[Read our guide to 11 outdoor installations to see in New York City.]

Along with Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer, the master planners of Brasília, Burle Marx (1909-1994) is the designer most responsible for our utopian impressions of the Brazilian built environment, with its superstructures of swooping concrete ringed by profuse green expanses. The garden here in the Bronx (designed by Raymond Jungles, a Miami-based protégé of Burle Marx) does not replicate a single Burle Marx design, but fuses the horticultural signatures of his more than 2,000 parks and gardens into a sort of ultra-tropical escape.