Crumbling El Dorado For A Sussex Surrealist

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.

- 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.