Travel: A surreal Mexican garden.
Deep in the Mexican jungle, an Englishman created an extraordinary garden, crammed with concrete follies and clouds of blue butterflies. It remains a strange, seductive place, finds Ivo Dawnay
Its location is almost the most surreal thing about it. Edward James's Las Pozas, the billionaire English eccentric's jungle garden, deep in Mexico's Sierra Madre mountains, is at least four hours, and a few hundred hairpin turns, from anywhere.
To get to it from the mollycoddled, middle-class ghettos of Mexico City, it takes about the same time as flying to New York, and twice as long as the hop to Miami. Hardly surprising then that, while everyone has heard about it, few have actually visited – discomfort being unfashionable in fashion-conscious Mesoamerica.
Yet it's worth the trip, involving passing over three mountain ranges and climates
– first arid, cactus-filled semi-desert, then temperate Alpine woodland and, finally, tropical forest. And the garden itself is, well, extraordinary.
Edward James was the quintessential poor little rich kid, born in Sussex in 1907, the heir to an enormous fortune. His early memories were of an absent US railroad tycoon father, his passionate love for Nanny and his cooler worship from afar of a society mother, who, he claimed, was the unacknowledged illegitimate daughter of Edward VII (making him, of course, the grandson).
In George Melly's hagiographic 1978 television documentary about him, James recalls poignantly hearing his mother call downstairs for ‘a child to take to church'.
‘Which one?' asks Nanny? ‘Whichever will go best with my blue dress,' comes the reply.
Owner of the vast West Dean estate in Sussex in his twenties, James was friend and sponsor of John Betjeman at Oxford. On a cloud of money, he drifted through the Paris art scene, adopting impoverished surrealists like so many strays. A penniless René Magritte sponged for six months with him in London, and the young Salvador Dalí cashed pictures like cheques with him – much to the Tate Gallery's later benefit.
He briefly married the gamine Austrian ballerina flirt, Tilly Losch, and lost her almost immediately to another surrealist, Max Ernst, despite commissioning
Diaghilev to write ballets for her, in a desperate bid to keep her on board.
Drifting to New York, then California, he decided to try the then fashionable resort town of Cuernavaca, south of Mexico City, where, at various times, Malcolm Lowry, DH Lawrence and, inevitably, Ernest Hemingway drowned their sorrows. There he met Plutarco Gastélum, a good-looking employee at the telephone exchange – someone more liberal with his favours than the flighty Tilly.
Now equipped with a svelte but practical Sancho Panza, there followed a several months-long quest for the perfect location for James's new obsession – a surrealist Garden of Eden – involving a lot of skinny-dipping in exotic locations.
It ended in Xilitla (pronounced Hi Itla) – ideal for James, whose aim was less a public entertainment than a discreetly private one, far from the prying eyes of the Mexican Establishment. What was to go in Xilitla, stayed in Xilitla – especially as local Catholic morality was no match for James's largesse.
Moreover, James had his own public reason for the location of his El Dorado. He reported that, after bathing in the stunning pools – the Pozas – that tumbled down from the rainforest, he saw a friend's body engulfed in blue butterflies, feasting on the water droplets. A sign, he claimed, hoping the locals would buy the line.
The story had a slight echo of the founding myth of the Mexican state, which says that the Aztecs chose their capital, forerunner of the modern megapolis, because it was where an eagle was seen grasping a snake in its beak – an augury promised by the priests.
The locals didn't buy the line at all, of course. But they were happy to put up with almost anything the loco gringo proposed, so long as the work kept flowing. From 1947 until his death in 1984, James kept building, employing up to 150 villagers on generous rates. Rather like Damien Hirst's
latest venture in Venice – into ‘fake history' – James's notion was of a place that would look like the ruins of an ancient civilisation, overgrown by jungle creepers.
Across almost 80 acres, eccentric, half-completed structures emerge from the forest. One or two are genuinely beautiful, in a Dalíesque sort of a way; several borrow from Magritte; others are merely camp; all are whimsical. There are rings and crowns that refer to the illustrations in Alice In Wonderland, a building called ‘A Three Storey House That Could be Five', a pool ornamented to look like a record player, and rows of river-dipping geese, like a chorus line made in concrete.
The actual ponds – where eternally dressing-gowned or naked James would entertain, often transported on a wooden throne, borne aloft by four equally nude bearers – are stunning, spilling down from a sixty-foot waterfall, cutting through the forest.
James took great pride in his lack of any engineering qualifications, saying that he doubled the amount of reinforcing steel to compensate. Still, the whole place would cause heart attacks for a holidaying officer from the Health and Safety Executive. Almost wherever I looked, whole families were teetering on threestorey, concrete platforms and eroding staircases with no handrails or the ‘helpful' National Trust signage we all know and love.
I asked my irreverent guide – Charlie – if they had a lot of accidents, hoping the answer would be an Hse-defying ‘No', but his response was more of a shrug. ‘We have a few deaths and injuries,' he said, ‘but it is usually drunken students who can't swim.' Nothing to worry too much about then.
The problem for the garden now is its recent success. Ignored for decades by almost all except the locals – grateful for the employment if not the dress code – it is now a bucket-list must for those trendy enough to put up with the appalling journey. In just five years, the visitor numbers are believed to have doubled and then doubled again.
With James's huge menagerie of birds and animals already long flown, the paths are eroding under the numbers, and the jungle is constantly threatening to take over. Meanwhile, the village has become a tourist town, with all the attendant vices. Everything was left to Plutarco on James's death, until he too died.
Plutarco's son – also James's godson – sold out for a mess of potage, and the garden is now in the hands of a well-meaning trust, supported by the Hernandez banking family. But its partners – Cemex, the state-owned cement company and the local regional authority – are less supportive than might be either sensible or desired. With its Svengali patriarch long gone, the golden goose may be being well and truly cooked.
Doggedly, however, Plutarco's heirs hang on to the scraps of their old empire. No visit to Las Pozas is complete without staying in Posada El Castillo, the house James bought for Plutarco and his family, where he used to stay when visiting.
The surrealist theme permeates here, too, with huge, foot-shaped concrete footsteps on the path to the front door, and towers and platforms teetering this way and that. If you can get in, of course. In a sort of Mexican version of Fawlty Towers, El Castillo's manager – another Plutarcan relative – refuses to answer the phone to take bookings or reply to emails, and keeps the front gate to the hotel firmly locked at all times to avoid disturbance. Unlike Hotel California, here you can check in anytime you like – but you can never be sure you'll arrive. That's surrealists for you.