We had a full morning to spend in Marrakesh before flying out to Madrid in the afternoon, and to spend it we were offered a choice between unstructured free time and an optional visit to the Jardin Majorelle. Sandie did not feel up to much walking, so she chose the former, and I the latter. I was not disappointed.
The Jardin Majorelle presented a very different prospect from the venues we had previously experienced in Marrakesh, and indeed in all of Morocco. We had been immersed in the history and culture of the country, both its ancient and modern facets, and that had been a splendid and eye-opening odyssey for all of us, I think. In the Jardin Majorelle, we encountered something totally novel: a verdant tropical garden in the midst of what is essentially a desert country, the implant of a culture quite unlike the Islamic Berber-Arab civilization we had been imbibing.
The Jardin Majorelle is the creation of Jacques Majorelle (1886-1962), a French artist who moved to Morocco for health reasons in 1917 and settled in Marrakesh. In 1923 he bought a 4-acre piece of property, had a house built and began planting a landscape garden. Over the years he continued to expand it.
The garden proved quite costly to maintain – after seeing it I can understand why – and in 1947 Majorelle was compelled to start charging admission to the public for visiting it. But the resulting income was meager, and Majorelle had to start selling parts of the property to keep out of the red. In the 1950s, following an expensive divorce, he was forced to sell the property altogether, and the new owners failed to keep it up, so it fell into decrepitude.
However, in the 1980s the fashion designer Yves Saint-Laurent and his partner and business manager Pierre Bergé discovered the property and fell in love with it. They bought it, restored it and opened it to the public. (They also acquired many of Majorelle’s paintings.) When Yves Saint-Laurent died in 2008, his ashes were interred in the garden. The property is now owned by the French non-profit Foundation Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent, and managed by the Marrakesh-based non-profit Foundation Jardin Majorelle.
The gardens now cover two and a half acres. Beside the villa and botanical collection, several museums are located there as well, including the Islamic Art Museum of Marrakesh, the Musee Yves St. Laurent, and the Berber Museum. I only had time to visit the last of these. It was quite interesting, but it did not allow photography inside, so I only shot the exterior of the museum.
In 1931 Jacques Majorelle commissioned the architect Paul Sinoir to design a Cubist villa to replace his previous house, and he bought additional acreage to expand the garden. During these years he also became noted for his so-called “Orientalist” paintings – I would characterize them rather as “Maghrebist” because they mostly depicted scenes from the streets, souks and kasbahs of the Maghreb – Islamic North Africa – rather than Asia. In Marrakesh Majorelle discovered — and ultimately patented — a rich deep-cobalt color, now known as bleu Majorelle, using it as the color of his villa.
Bleu majorelle appears elsewhere throughout the garden, for example on a lushly overgrown arbor near the villa, many of the flowerpots scattered around the grounds, and the banks of the pools and watercourses.
The gardens include exotic plants from all over the world, especially the tropical areas, but they are most noted for their collection of cacti, which comprise the majority of their holdings. Some people, especially from the southwestern USA and Mexico, tend to dismiss the gardens as uninteresting because they can see plenty of cactus in their own countries. Now I’m from southern California myself, and I can see plenty of cactus around where I live, and they are certainly well-represented in the Jardin Majorelle; but it also has many more varieties, from all over the world, and they include more diverse, bizarre and intriguing species than I could have ever dreamed of. For example, there are Opuntia galapageia, a tree-like cactus from the Galapagos Islands, Lepismium cruciforme or Hurricane Cactus from South America and Euphorbia canariensis from (surprise!) the Canary Islands. (Manuel Sueiras ought to know about these, since he was born there.)
The Euphorbia canariensis especially struck my fancy because with its many offshoot branches it looked like a Jewish menorah gone crazy. As for the non-cactus plants, I most loved the pony-tail palm, also known as the elephant’s-foot tree, with its stout bulbous base which enables it to store considerable amounts of water to tide it over through dry spells. It is native to southern Mexico and Central America.
There were many other bizarre and wonderful plants that I would mention if I could, but there were not always signs or placards to identify them. At least I captured a number of them in the photos displayed above, and readers are invited to identify them and submit comments if they recognize them.