India Trekker: Jardín Etnobotánico de Oaxaca

This is a stunning garden, designed by artists. An absolute must visit if you are in Oaxaca. But first some background:

Nearly 20 years ago, the Mexican military moved out of the sixteenth-century Santo Domingo monastery complex it had used as a base for more than 120 years. Mexico’s president gave the exit order after being lobbied by Francisco Toledo, one of Mexico’s best-known living artists. Toledo, age 71, and other leading artists and intellectuals belong to Pro-Oax, an advocacy group that promotes the protection of art, culture, and the natural environment in Oaxaca. The state government wanted the 5-acre parcel in the heart of downtown Oaxaca City to create a hotel, convention center, and parking facility. A restoration team brought in by the National Institute of Anthropology and History wanted to establish a European garden in the seventeenth-century baroque style. Some of Toledo’s fellow artists wanted to use the grounds for workshops and exhibition space.

In 1993, when Toledo knew the army would be leaving, he asked Alejandro de Ávila B., who had family roots in Oaxaca and training in anthropology, biology, and linguistics, what he and other advocates would propose. De Ávila suggested making the space into a botanic garden—or, more precisely, an ethnobotanic garden, one that would “show the interaction of plants and people.” De Ávila, who was just about to leave Oaxaca to begin his doctoral studies at University of California, Berkeley, quickly turned in a concept paper defining the garden’s mission and the various educational functions it could fulfill. From this point one of the world’s most original public gardens was born.

I'm afraid my photos do not do it justice.

Inside visiting the garden and a view of part of the monastery.

Organ pipe cactus planted here next to a mirror pool are traditionally used in Mexico as borders, corrals, and fences to keep out foraging livestock or strangers.

Plants were brought from far and wide in Oaxaca to be grown in the garden.

All the plantings were done with an artist's eye to telling a story about Oaxaca.

If you go, you can only get in by taking a tour and English tours are only offered three times in the week. Worth every minute and penny.

A barrel cactus they claim is 500 years old.

Purple flowers on a tree that had leaves which reminded me of sage.

An usual plant which has fronds that feel like plastic.

The zigzag step-fret inspiration continues throughout the garden, ecological requirements of plants determined a few monochromatic rock beds, and repetitive plantings of agave are included to emphasize its cultural and biogeographic significance.

Like a Joshua Tree, I believe this is referred to as an Elephant Foot.

An ingenious rain water collection system. Water on roof, is directed to spouts which drop the water into the courtyard. The stone plots beneath each spout, capture the water and deliver it via an underground canal system to other parts of the garden.