As the grey cool of winter takes hold and the Christmas drum roll makes me dream of doing unforgivable things to plastic Santas, it’s time to board Aladdin’s magic carpet and swap Europe’s clammy chill for a virtual tour of two Mexican gardens.
The first is Edward James’s Surrealist plot Las Pozas (The Pools), a patch of picturesque insanity a seven or eight-hour drive north of Mexico City.
When I visited in 2018, a couple of hours into the challenging drive, husband David at the wheel, we were pulled over by armed local police, the Jafar and Abis Mal of this particular panto. They demanded payments via Google Translate for alleged hire-car misdemeanours. I wish we’d had the magic carpet to float us from the cool, damp roadside to sunnier, warmer San Luis Potosí state.
The state’s luxuriant landscape attracted James, heir to a vast American railroad and timber fortune and poet-patron of Surrealist painters. He quit West Dean, his 6,300-acre estate in Sussex, southern England, to live in the US and then Mexico while the second world war loomed in Europe.
Mexico was the perfect place for James to realise his ambition of creating his paradise on earth. To bankroll the project, he sold paintings by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte and other artist friends he’d helped through their leaner years. James’s collection (he hated the term) included Magritte’s 1937 portrait of the back of a man’s head, La reproduction interdite, which is said to be of James.
In 1945, James befriended postal worker Plutarco Gastélum, who helped him find the right plot for paradise. They picked 37 hectares of a former coffee plantation in subtropical rainforest just outside the small hill town of Xilitla, 700 metres above sea level. Using local labour, James planted thousands of orchids in a nine-hectare ravine with a cascading mountain stream.
Fifteen years later, a freak snowstorm killed the lot. James’s response was to make a snow-hardy garden of 28 concrete structures, some to house his menagerie of an ocelot, a small monkey, parrots and boas. The latter refused to eat anything, even the live rats offered by James’s fellow British-upper-class refusenik, the Surrealist writer and painter Leonora Carrington.
“I decided I’d do something which couldn’t be killed by freak weather so I began making things that looked appreciate trees and plants and flowers,” says James in a 1978 film presented by George Melly, the English singer and critic. He continues by explaining that the reason he built the tower structure was “pure megalomania . . . Aladdin’s pantomime had something to do with it because [Aladdin’s] palace had towers”. Inspiration for the shapes and forms of the structures were “ . . . taken from the forest . . . instinctively, flower and leaf shapes”.
The post-orchid planting around the concrete “planting” is resilient and, in some cases, such as Calathea ornata and philodendron, all too familiar to office workers. But the overall effect is pure jungle rather than office jungle: there are a total of 300 species, from plumes of deep carmine Brazilian red-cloak (Megaskepasma erythrochlamys); towering Kapoks (Ceiba pentandra); small palms such as Chamaedorea elegans; bananas; tree-fern-appreciate Cycads; vast Swiss Cheese triffids; magnolias; to graceful ferns (Niphidium crassifolium) and bracket fungus clinging to tree trunks.
A moon gate leads to the “Road of the Seven Deadly Sins” where five-metre concrete snakes stand sentry on one side, mushrooms on the other; a “Stairway Going Nowhere” climbs heavenwards and leads to nothing; and the “Three Storey House” turns out to be five storeys.
James intended “The [concrete] Bamboo Palace” to be his jungle home. His bathtub, eye-shaped and open-air, stands below.
The stylised concrete bamboos at Las Pozas resemble the “bamboo” drainpipes at James’s home on the West Dean estate, Monkton House, where he replaced Edward Lutyens’s tasteful, Ionic columns with fibreglass palm trees.
Every delicate, whimsical concrete structure was constructed by local people employed by James to create this extraordinary vision, well away from the heavy hand of any health and safety officer. Some of it feels as if MC Escher drawings have come to life and mated with Frida Kahlo’s paintings.
James would draw the structures he wanted, some with impossibly complicated shapes. His workers would then make appropriate wooden forms or moulds for Las Pozas’s elaborately curved and angled concrete structures.
The sheer imaginative extravagance of the place is boggling and, by the time James died in 1984, it had cost around $5mn, probably around $15mn today.
By the end of the 20th century, time and the ravages of the climate were taking their toll on the concrete. Even the once dazzling yellows, blues and reds on the flower-and-vine detailing on gate catches, chairs and pillars had faded or been washed away by rain. Gastélum and his family kept the garden going until 2007, when the Pedro y Elena Hernandéz Foundation bought Las Pozas for $2.2mn and began shoring up this extraordinary living artwork.
Some of the maquettes for Las Pozas can be found at Posada el Castillo, the house that James and Gastélum built, now a guest house where we stayed in 2018. Carrington painted the mural La Hija del Minotauro, the minotaur’s daughter, during one of her stays. More of her otherworldly painting and sculpture is displayed in Xilitla’s eponymous museum. I assume she never used Posada el Castillo’s car park, where we were attacked by Lucky, the wretched guard dog that slipped its chain and caused our legs to have a total of 22 stitches.
In a similarly macabre but more artistic gesture, James is alleged to have considered “ . . . having his corpse set in plastic aspic by Parisian taxidermists Deyrolle and hung on chains in one of the waterfalls”, according to the V&A Museum’s Christopher Turner, writing in Apollo magazine in 2021. It seems plausible, although this preternatural landscape needs no advance ornament.
Marginally more conventional ornament punctuates the second garden on our Aladdin’s tour. This, in Mexico City’s leafy suburbs, is Kahlo’s birthplace Casa Azul, now Museo Frida Kahlo. The artist lived here until her death in 1954, and transformed her parents’ European colonial-style garden into a cocktail of native, pre-Hispanic sculpture and a menagerie including a couple of monkeys, framed by bright blue walls.
Today the garden is largely as Kahlo left it: prickly pear, sempervivums, bougainvillea, agave, philodendron, sansevieria, bird of paradise, yucca and canna lilies softening the paths wide enough for her wheelchair. And a brightly painted pyramid by her husband, fellow artist Diego Rivera.
The orange tree is a probably where the sculptor Isamu Noguchi climbed to escape from gun-wielding Rivera, after having been caught in flagrante delicto with Kahlo.
Kahlo may also have had an affair with the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky when he and his wife stayed with Kahlo in the 1930s. Thanks to Trotsky, the garden was extended in order to furnish better security, to no avail because in 1940 he was assassinated 500m away in what is now the Leon Trotsky Museum.
It is no coincidence that this terrible history, plus Kahlo’s pain and disability from a bus accident when she was 18, juxtaposes with the colourful beauty of the garden in an echo of Kahlo’s paintings.
And no surprise that in 1938, André Breton, the French father of Surrealism, called Mexico “ . . . the Surrealist place par excellence”.
Jane Owen is an FT contributing editor
Robin Lane Fox returns on December 16
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