Oases of serenity
Beautiful gardens are scattered throughout ancient Marakkesh in Morocco, offering respite to eyes and souls alike.
Marrakesh’s most unusual garden is far removed from the popular tourist city’s turmoil. It’s Anima, created by austrian artist andre heller, and although it was just opened in 2016, the garden does not look new, but instead completely in-grown.
“To achieve this, we needed the most painstaking logistics to transport tall palm trees and cacti through the country,” he says.
The austrian has designed gardens in many countries, but Anima is his lifetime achievement. exotic plants are growing up around works of art. For example, there is a metre-tall bust made of mosaic pieces and which emits a fine vaporous spray. Then there is a sculpture by pop artist keith haring with a tall cactus standing beside it.
Marrakesh, Morocco, has yet other fascinating oases to show.
One garden that scarcely any visitor to the Moroccan royal city passes without visiting is the Jardin Majorelle. It is renowned for the brilliant cobalt-blue colour of its buildings and fountains, providing a pretty contrast to the greenery of cacti and palm trees.
Jacques Majorelle, a French painter and plant collector, created the garden in the 1920s. In 1980, fashion giant Yves saint Laurent bought it and expanded on the cactus garden by bringing in imposing thorny plants from the United states.
The gardens of Marrakesh wouldn’t be possible without an ingenious water supply system. Using a 1,000-year-old technology, a system of subterranean pipelines brings water into the city from the nearby atlas Mountains.
It is in the Jardin Secret on the edge of the medina, or old city, that this hydraulic system has survived to this day.
Once one has managed to get through the narrow and boisterous souks, or marketplaces, for which Marrakesh is famous, one is suddenly in the midst of peace, quiet and beauty.
It’s the secret garden, opened in 2016, that originated with an old riad, or Moroccan house with a protected courtyard garden.
Marrakesh in fact is filled with riads. Many of the historic ensembles are hotels today. Beyond their gates, one enters into paradisical gardens, many of them open to visitors who are not hotel guests.
Imposing walls with battlements surround one of the most spacious gardens of the city. In the 18th century, sultan Mohamed Ben abdellah laid out the 8ha Arsat Garden that included crop plants and a palace for his son, Mamoun. The layout is symmetrical, in a style typical of Islamic ornamentation. In 1923, the palace was converted into Marrakesh’s first hotel.
But even guests who do not stay in the legendary hotel can still stroll through what is now the La Mamounia Garden and drink mint tea under towering palm trees. Centuries-old olive trees line the paths of the garden, their fruit harvested for oil. – dpa