Gardens around the world

Topic in Gardening courses

Africa

See also African keyhole gardens

A very nice garden in a South African township, made by school children. Gardens go in many sorts and it's always nice to pick up ideas from seeing how others did it.

Mexico

Did you know that the 2,000-year old gardens of the Aztecs still exist? There are many hundreds of hectares of these gardens in Xochimiko, part of what is now Mexico City. In the time of the Aztecs these gardens were floating in a lake but by now they have become islands of very fertile soil. Crops grow in raised beds and are harvested six times a year.

Luis Barragan was a Mexican modernist architect who also designed gardens. Look at three of his garden creations where you mainly see tops of trees, some bushes and lawns, and for the rest brightly colored high walls. He made creatively use of light to make serene environments.

This third video about gardens in Mexico leads us into the world of cacti. They can create amazing landscapes. Monty Don visits what's said to be the biggest tree in the world and is showing a modern botanical garden in Oaxaca.

See an exotic garden in the middle of the Mexican jungle. The place is Las Pozas, Xilitla, Northern Mexico. A surrealistic garden was created here by Edward James, a multimillionaire who spent much money on building ghostly concrete structures that seem to grow like the jungle does. The atmosphere is unworldly and fantastic. Even today, 50 employees are needed to maintain the garden.