Mexico and Cuba Around the World in 80 Gardens

I believe that a really good way to understand a culture is through its gardens.

This is an extraordinary journey to visit 80 inspiring gardens from all over the world.

Some are very well known, like the Taj Mahal or the Alhambra.

And I'm also challenging my idea of what a garden actually is.

So I'm visiting gardens that float on the Amazon, a strange fantasy in the jungle,

as well as the private homes of great designers and the desert flowering in a garden.

And, wherever I go, I shall be meeting people that share my own passion for gardens

on my epic quest to see the world through 80 of its most fascinating and beautiful gardens.

This week I'll be visiting two countries.

One is Cuba, a Caribbean island where,

in the middle of the crumbling colonial grandeur of its urban landscape,

a green revolution is taking place.

The other is Mexico,

a country that has one of the widest range of flora in the world

and where a rich and ancient civilization is deeply entwined with its plant life,

and where that relationship has been transformed into art through its gardens.

I begin my journey in one of the world's most populous cities, Mexico City.

Then I will head south to Oaxaca,

which has the most diverse flora in Mexico.

Next, I'll travel north to the jungle

and the small town of Xilitla.

And finally I'll cross the Gulf of Mexico

to end up in Havana, the capital of Cuba.

I'm in a cemetery in the middle of the night,

where a vigil is being kept

as part of the celebrations for the Day of the Dead.

On the Day of the Dead, every grave and home

is decked in a blaze of orange marigolds -

orange being the colour that the Aztecs believe the dead most easily recognise,

to guide and welcome the returning deceased,

so the whole family, living and dead alike,

are reunited again for just for one day of the year.

This strange fusion of Catholicism and pre-Hispanic ritual

has its roots in one of the richest and oldest gardening civilizations of the world.

500 years ago, what has now become modern Mexico City

was the epicentre of the Aztec civilization.

The Aztecs built their huge city on a great salt-water lake.

But, via a sophisticated drainage system that removed the salt water

and channelled in fresh water, they transformed the landscape.

But even before the arrival of the Aztecs,

the Xochimilca people had built islands or floating gardens,

which became one of the most productive methods of cultivation

known to mankind, and the earliest perennially flowering gardens.

Just an hour's slow drive from the centre of Mexico City

are the floating gardens of Xochimilco.

I first heard about these about 15 years ago, and I actually came to Mexico intending to see them.

I didn't manage to get to them. So I've wanted to see them for a long time,

partly because the idea of floating gardens, discovered by the Spaniards,

this incredible civilization that had made gardens

for agriculture and flowers on a lake, is such an interesting idea.

But also because I feel I start here and get a grip on these ancient, ancient gardens

and the history of the place, and that's the right way to begin this journey.

The original floating gardens are at least 2,000 years old,

and at the peak of the Aztec empire there were some 50,000 acres under production.

They became the agricultural hub of the great Aztec civilization of Tenochtitlan,

which was a city of over 200,000 people

and, at the time, the largest conurbation in the world.

They're called floating gardens but they're not floating at all

because they go down to the bottom of the lake.

But they're built up in layers of vegetation and mud, like a cake, and then they are fixed to a degree.

You can see the revetments along the side, this paling, but also the trees along the edge.

The roots go down into the lake and hold the whole thing like a basket

and the trees provide a little sort of microclimate.

But the scale of it!

When you think there are tens of thousands of hectares -

to do all that by hand is beyond all imagination.

Beautiful white herons or egrets, I'm not sure quite which they are...

..standing sentinel on the side of the banks.

Whoops!

During the period leading up to the Day of the Dead,

tangerine fields of African marigolds dominate many of the gardens.

Many of the floating gardens, or "chinampas", are still cultivated using traditional methods,

and Doctor Erwin Stephan Otto is the director of a special ecology park

that aims to preserve this unique and endangered ecosystem.

We have here about 1,400 hectares of chinampas.

-The chinampas are quite small, aren't they?

-Quite small.

-So thousands and thousands of them.

-Thousands of them.

So these canals that we see are actually just the remnants of the lake?

Sure. And they say that in 1850

there were about 70,000 boats going every day to the centre of the city

with the products of the area of Xochimilco.

Is everything always grown on these raised beds?

Yes, this is the original way of growing in chinampas.

First they bring special mud from some parts of the lake.

They leave it one day to dry it out, and make the little squares.

If it's a big plant you make bigger squares.

These are small squares,

and with a finger you put the seed.

Then you put the vegetation on top.

In three weeks you have a plant already growing.

In 12 weeks you have about 25 to 30 centimetes

and you transplant it to other warm beds.

This warm bed is called "el macizo" in Spanish.

You can have 18,000 little plants.

This mud looks beautiful.

Well, the nutrients are so high that we don't use any kind of chemicals for this.

-This is organic.

-Everything organic?

Everything is organic.

Why? Because we can have six harvests a year.

The chinampa is by osmosis always wet.

You need water. Whenever it rains it's OK.

Otherwise you take it from the canal.

How fantastic.

I think that these floating gardens are not just beautiful but they also have a truly potent atmosphere.

There's a kind of psychic energy that's stored in the place, like a battery, that comes from

1,000, 2,000 years of people tending it in the same way, across century after century.

And I'm sure that works. I'm sure it's a really powerful thing, that.

And it's all part of my understanding not just of the ancient Aztec civilisation

but also the modern Mexican culture that coexists with it.

Mexico City is a vast urban sprawl inhabited by some 20 million people.

It's a polluted and chaotic place, full of colour and energy.

The Floating Gardens were absolutely fundamental to the old city.

But modern Mexico City is a vast place.

It's unruly, noisy and seemingly unregulated.

And one of the truly great architects of the 20th century lived right in its middle.

His name was Luis Barragan, and he made thoroughly modern houses and gardens.

But he believed that all of them should reflect the true spirit of Mexico,

which is why I'm on my way to visit his home.

Luis Barragan is recognised as one of the 20th century's most influential architects.

But he is less known for his gardens,

which are also modern but rooted deep in Mexican culture.

And I consider his gardens to be so significant that, whilst I'm here in Mexico City,

I'm taking the opportunity to visit three different ones.

He lived here, at Casa Barragan, until his death in 1988.

The garden now seems very overgrown and probably

doesn't resemble Barragan's original vision for the space.

I've seen pictures of gardens and buildings by Barragan,

but this is the first time I've ever been in one.

I remember reading that he said a garden should be a refuge, a place of stillness.

This is completely enclosed. In fact the walls are so high, it's like being in a shaft.

The roof terrace is a revelation.

It is dramatically filled by shimmering colour, sunlight and crisp shade.

To discover more about Barragan

I've met up with Mario Schjetnan, a fellow landscape architect

and friend of Barragan's for over 20 years.

There have been discussions, whole discussions, seminars,

saying Barragan is not a landscape architect

because he doesn't work with plants. It's nonsense.

It's about sky, it's about light.

It's about the notion of connecting the sky

with the horizontal, with the ground. That's landscape architecture.

There's one element missing, and that is the human.

You do need the human aspect.

Absolutely.

That's why landscape architecture and gardening are an art.

And yet it is the most human of all arts because you inhabit it.

It's not a picture.

It's not a sculpture.

You are completely surrounded.

For instance, this marvellous terrace in his house -

there is not a single pot, or even a single furniture.

It's about this basic cell.

It is about the void and the connection with the sky.

And then you can only barely see the tops of trees.

Once I asked him, "You talk very much about mystery in your work."

And he said, "Well, mystery is very simple.

"Mystery is a tree behind a wall."

Because it intensifies the notion of what's behind that wall.

Is there a beautiful woman?

Is there a beautiful patio? Is there water in that patio?

So the beginning and the end of high art is in the garden.

In many ways Barragan was a maverick,

and his work was widely denigrated

by the Mexican architectural establishment at the time.

His desire to break with convention led him to build houses and gardens in improbable situations.

El Pedregal de San Angel is a volcanic area which was formed

when the Xitle volcano erupted 2,500 years ago.

The remains of some of the landscape

have been used here to create land art on a giant scale.

This boiling, smeared landscape at El Pedregal

inspired Barragan to buy land for

what amounted to a housing estate in the mid 1940s.

At the time, the Mexicans thought he was crazy,

and it didn't make him any money.

But there was a sort of

inspired artistic craziness that Barragan tapped into.

He needed to break the mould to move forward.

And it was on this landscape

that he developed a new style of house and garden.

He created a series of extraordinary gardens here, like surreal volcanic orchards,

using the quality of the rock and its textures

to contrast with strategically placed trees and shrubs.

Today the area has changed dramatically,

with only a few of Barragan's gardens remaining.

I've come to Casa Prieto, to meet Eduardo Prieto, the grandson of the original owner.

And the same family has lived here ever since it was built in 1950.

And I really want to see is what it's been like to grow up in,

and still to live in, a Barragan house and garden rather than just visit one as a work of art.

It took Barragan two and a half years to build Casa Prieto,

but he designed the garden first.

Does it work as a house to live in?

It works because I am used to it.

I don't know if the scale

is something that other people could live with.

The house itself has a very open plan, and then there are these huge windows

that make it seem like you don't know where the house ends and where the garden starts.

I suppose the house was pretty revolutionary when it was built, and that it was breaking new ground.

It was for city life,

but it also has a lot of Mexican tradition

in its proportions and in how people live in it.

It is sort of very solid to the outside

but to the garden it is very open.

And this is how people live in the...

sort of... the countryside.

At Casa Prieto, Barragan drew his inspiration from the traditional Mexican hacienda.

Rural pots, sculptures and his obsession with horses

were all integrated into the architecture and landscape.

Across the city is my third Barragan garden,

where he continued to develop his style of balancing massive volumes

of colour, light and shade

fused with very Mexican motifs.

This is Casa Galvez, the last of the Barragan houses I will be visiting.

And immediately you come in, you've got the trademark Barragan pink leading you to the front door,

but he's lowered the ceiling, confining the space.

Then in the courtyard you've got the Barragan pots and the colours,

but it is quite formal with these massive walls.

I guess in summer this fig tree will be a very shady, bulky green.

You come round the corner and immediately, brilliantly, it's transformed,

because the white becomes pink, it's a private space,

and this great wall, you realise, exists to block off access to the window,

so the pool and the pink landscape is primarily designed to be viewed

from the inside of the house.

But when you come through the house,

into what is the completely private space,

everything explodes out and you get these vast walls of colour,

walls, of course, which create privacy.

But the effect is one of complete generosity of light and colour and space.

This garden at Casa Galvez does pull together all the elements

of Barragan's work and put it into a domestic setting.

I guess for most people that's how they see gardens - they're attached to homes.

But it actually doesn't lessen my opinion that the distillation of his work, the essence of it,

is to be found at Casa Barragan, on that roof terrace,

where you just have light...

..volume...

colour...

in its purist form.

Barragan chose to live in the middle of Mexico city

but he drew much of his inspiration from the Mexican countryside and its traditions and folklore.

So I'm now leaving the city to learn more about the landscape, culture and history

of this huge country through the medium of its gardens.

I'm going south to Oaxaca, the historic home of the Zapotec and Mixtec peoples,

which contains 157 indigenous languages

and has more than a 1,000 species of plants native to the region.

The landscape here is dominated by the fluted stems of organ-pipe cactus.

These cacti form an integral part of the local culture.

Ive taken a few minutes off from the road to Oaxaca to stretch my legs here in the Cuicatlan valley,

which is apparently the place that holds the biggest range of cacti anywhere in the world.

And they're everywhere; tiny ones to these beautiful vast ones.

And it's a strange, sort of surreal landscape.

Very beautiful.

The scale of these gnarled and scarred plants is truly breathtaking.

But I'm carrying on further south to the magnificent mountain-top ruins of Monte Alban.

It is an astonishing, awesome site.

This was the Zapotec capital between 200 and 900AD.

For over 700 years, this was the centre of a sophisticated, powerful culture,

but then it was abandoned by 1000AD, and no-one knows why.

The levelling of the mountain top to create this plateau

is an astonishing feat of engineering.

Wow!

The ruins here are on a scale as monumental as Rome or Athens,

and it doesn't seem fanciful to me to see the shapes and scale of Barragan's work in these ruins.

The reason I have come here in particular,

as if the beauty wasn't enough, it is staggeringly beautiful,

is to get this sense of an ancient culture,

a culture that was as sophisticated as practically anything

that has happened in the West thousands of years ago.

A culture that understood gardens, understood plants, and applied it to their lives.

And you get this mix of plants in a landscape

and humanity and history all coming together.

If you get that feeling in a place, then you're armed and informed

and can get much closer to the modern gardens.

Although the conquistadors plundered and pillaged their way across Mexico,

it seems that the Spanish never discovered Monte Alban,

and so, thankfully, it has remained relatively intact.

It's not just historical landscapes that are part of the culture.

In the small town of Tule, just outside Oaxaca city,

is an ancient botanical monument I have always wanted to see.

I've stopped off to see this, which is the Tule Tree, which is a Montezuma cypress,

and is reckoned to be the biggest tree in the world and certainly one of the oldest.

Now, I have seen photographs of it, and it is certainly worth a detour,

if not coming to Mexico just to see it! It is very, very famous.

But nothing, nothing, prepares you for the scale of it.

And also the thing that which I hadn't expected

is it is staggeringly beautiful.

It is truly colossal.

It's 150ft tall and, at 190ft in circumference,

it would take 30 people linking arms to hug its girth.

It's also ancient, being at least 1500 years old.

This tree was ancient when the conquistadors came,

and it was old when the Aztecs' culture began.

It's seen them, and no doubt it will see our civilization pass and fade away.

The Tule Tree, dwarfing the church of Santa Maria, is one of the wonders of the world.

The conquistadors didn't just bring their colonial style of architecture to Oaxaca.

They also brought with them something that would affect

the local people even more - their religion.

Very soon after the conquistadors took control,

the church came in and exerted just as strong a control in its own way,

converting the Indians and imposing themselves by building churches, some of them vast.

And this is one of them.

The Church of Santo Domingo is one of the finest examples of baroque architecture in Latin America.

It is dazzling in its magnificence.

CHORAL SINGING

You walk in and immediately have this sense of incredible riches,

and this astonishing wall of gold, and what it says

is this is the house of the one true God,

and he is a powerful and rich God.

It seems that the display of sacrificial death appealed to the duality of

the Indian culture where life and death were present in everything.

Next to the church is a complex of courtyards and cloisters

that was a Dominican convent from 1608 until 1857

when it fell into neglect, and it has just recently been restored.

The building is, of course, wonderful, but, for all its glories,

it's not the reason why I am here, because attached to it was a garden.

When they restored the convent in the early 90s they decided to do the garden as well,

and there's lots of archaeological evidence for it.

But rather than recreate a monastic garden, what they've done

is make a modern botanic garden, using plants of the Oaxaca region.

The garden is a celebration of the incredibly diverse flora of the area,

taking the visitor through thousands of years of Oaxaca's natural history.

But it's more than just a collection of plants.

It is also very beautiful and skilfully designed,

very different from most botanical gardens.

I've seen cacti used as a hedge like this

in villages as we've driven through,

but used like this on this scale is magnificent beautiful,

and it creates a sort of wonderful cathedral-like volume of space.

There's something niggling at me, and it's almost irritating me.

It's like walking around an art gallery rather than a garden.

It feels, to be honest, a little bit cold.

The fact that this feels more like a gallery than a garden

is maybe because it is designed by a painter called Luis Zarate

and this is his first garden. Ever.

What really interests me is how you as an artist, creating a work of art

relate to all of the problems of a garden.

A garden that grows and changes.

TRANSLATION: First of all, I had to resist my own artistic ego

and concentrate on bringing out the intrinsic beauty of the plants instead.

I want to say more about the plants than simply botanical facts.

I tried to communicate poetically with the visitor,

to try to give the architecture,

and the layout of the plants a poetical feeling.

The artistic challenge was not the only struggle Luis faced in creating the garden.

TRANSLATION: The government wanted to turn this into a hotel,

and the old botanical garden into a car park.

At the same time, we, the painters of Oaxaca

started to work out what we could do with it.

Then, we started to fight against the government to stop this place being turned into a car park.

So, the reclaiming of Santa Domingo is an achievement of the people of Oaxaca.

There is a way of working called "el tequio", meaning working for free, for the community.

I said earlier that I found the garden a bit cold...

beautiful, but I wasn't really connecting to it.

But, I now realise that I was completely wrong about that,

and that this garden is just bursting with humanity.

I was very moved by the way that in the teeth of sort of corporate brutality

that the local people wanted to make in a garden something for the public

to appreciate their culture, their history and indeed their future.

But I'm now leaving the mountains and deserts of Oaxaca to find a garden lost in the Mexican jungle.

Xilitla is north of Mexico City.

It is a straggling mountain town with the jungle leaning in on it.

It is a strange place.

But it's not nearly as bizarre as the garden that was made here

by someone who was no more a local than I am.

I am about to go into a garden which I think could only have been made here in the jungle in Mexico,

given the timing and the circumstances of its creation.

However, its creator was a very English eccentric.

This garden is some 50 acres of tamed jungle

and contains over 200 whimsical and weird concrete structures,

and all are the creation of Edward James.

Edward James first came to Mexico in 1947, and he chose to settle in this spot

because he came with a friend and walked up this ravine, and they found these natural pools.

The friend stripped off, had a swim, and then lay on the rocks sunbathing.

And as he did so apparently a cloud of blue butterflies descended

on the body and just smothered him with these blue butterflies.

And Edward James thought this was such a fantastically surreal image,

that he saw this as a sign that this was where he had to make his surreal garden.

Edward James was born into great wealth.

His family owned the huge West Dean Estate in Sussex.

However, James made his name and another fortune in the 1920s and 30s

when he began collecting surrealist art.

The initial plans for Las Pozas seemed to have been relatively modest,

at least in the terms of an eccentric multi-millionaire,

more like a private zoo than a jungle fantasy.

And he did ship a menagerie of caged animals to Xilitla.

By 1960 James began to talk about creating his extraordinary dream-like constructions.

He said he decided to build them 'simply because he liked to see something nice'.

And, casually at first, then later obsessively, his subconscious began

to take literal concrete form in the middle of the jungle.

Look at that.

It's extraordinary.

It doesn't rationalise,

but is it beautiful?

And does it need to be beautiful?

I don't know. I don't know.

This place just plunges you under the water of irrationality and the subconciousness and says swim.

I haven't a clue where I am going. I'm completely, totally lost.

You can see pieces of James' cultural history,

almost glued to the surface of this.

A fleur-de-lis in the middle of the Mexican Jungle.

And, of course, if this was in Europe,

the health and safety police would have closed it down.

Unsafe, and what they'd really be saying

is not just unsafe for your body, but unsafe for your mind.

You shouldn't be having these thoughts.

But James could do what he liked in Xilitla.

Mexico wasn't judgemental about personal behaviour in the way that Europe and America were.

It was also without building regulation of any kind,

and there was a local and very cheap labour force only too glad of the work.

I am bedevilled and struggling with this idea

of beauty as a pure thing and this place which is chaos in a sense.

Ugly things next to beautiful things.

I mean, look at that, look at that...thing.

To me, it's not doing anything other than being kitsch and naff

and is absolutely no better or worse than a garden gnome.

Now this I think is fantastic, where you have plant-like forms

encrusted with moss and lichens and ferns,

with trees of vaguely similar form growing up around them.

You don't quite know which is which.

So, cheek by jowl with the most wonderful exotic, beautiful, fabulous stuff,

is bit of complete kitsch, and it's upsetting me.

I don't know what to think.

I mean there is the fact that I could just be a boring old fart who likes the vaguely familiar...

..and finds aspects of the sort of surrealistic way of doing things

in a garden as too unsettling.

It rattles my cage a bit too much.

THUNDER RUMBLES

The weather changes from hot and steamy, to rainy and surprisingly cool.

To find out more about James, I am meeting the current owner, James' godson Plutarcho Gastelum.

Plutarcho's father was in charge of the day-to-day building work in the garden

and James would often stay with the family on his visits to Mexico,

so Plutarcho knew James since he was a small child.

-You grew up here didn't you?

-Yes.

What was it like being a child in this garden?

It was magical because it was like a different country.

Now, it's different, it's fantastic but kind of ghostly or melancholic,

but at that time it was very vivid

because we had more than 100 workers and they were all my friends.

And Edward James used to have a lot of animals too,

and at that point the place looked like a private zoo or something.

So it was an incredible place for a child.

What was he like as a man?

Describe to me your memories of him.

Yeah, that's something because... I have a different perception,

I could see because for my sisters and I he was our private Santa.

But I could see with my parents it was more difficult,

especially my father because my father was in charge of

all the mundane matters about building a place like this.

Paying the bills, keep the records.

And I could see that he was difficult,

because he didn't have schedules, not even to eat or to sleep.

He didn't realise very well about the mundane world.

So, my father complained a lot about that,

but at the same time he was laughing all the time

about the adventures of Edward James here in Mexico.

Las Pozas is unedited, unfettered, unbalanced and completely unworldly,

and its future is uncertain.

Plutarcho told me he employs 50 people whose sole job is to cut back the jungle.

Perhaps James could afford his follies to be so extreme

because he knew the jungle would one day consume him,

just as it has consumed the lost Aztec cities.

We use words cheaply when we're describing gardens, and I know I'm as guilty as anybody,

but this more than any other garden in the world can truly be described as fantastic.

It is like no other, and yet, again and again as I walk around it

I'm reminded of an 18th century milord,

touring Europe, buying extraordinary things

and using them to create a series of follies in a landscaped park,

with ruined chapels and temples and re-routed rivers

and villages swept away so a ha-ha can be built.

And that the result is this extraordinary creation in the middle of the Mexican Jungle

just makes it even more extraordinary and unlike anything else.

What I have seen in Mexico has been inspiring and fascinating,

from the ancient history of the floating gardens

to Barragan's great volumes of colour and light,

and the cool, clean lines of the cactus garden built upon its sense of local identity.

But now, I'm moving on to a very different world,

albeit geographically close to Mexico,

where the gardens are a product of political necessity and social will.

My journey takes me to the largest island in the Caribbean.

Cuba lies just 140 miles to the east of Mexico

and I'm heading to the capital, Havana.

I've been wanting to visit Havana for ages.

It doesn't take long to see that it is beautiful, ruined,

and the sexiest place on this earth.

Now that's all rather good but I've come to find out about

an organic revolution that's taking place right across the country,

that could be a model for the climate-changed, post-oil world.

Around a fifth of Cuba's population live in Havana.

It's a city that is undoubtedly seductive and exhilarating, but suffering from decades of neglect.

It's a very beautiful city, because it's not what I call face-lift beauty,

manicured and tweaked, it's like a wonderful face on a 70-year-old woman,

a lifetime's worth of beauty that's accumulated.

As you travel around the city you do get a sense of a place frozen in time.

Most of the vehicles are pre-1959, lovingly maintained,

and they add hugely to the city's charm.

But among the decrepit buildings of the old city,

there is a strange pairing of decay and healthy growth.

Hola, buenos dias.

This might seem like an unlikely place for a garden,

but actually it's both incredibly interesting and also very typical of what's going on here in Cuba.

After the Russians withdrew their economic support at the end of the 80s

and the collapse of the Soviet empire,

Cuba was found in a situation where they had no food,

they absolutely had to start growing food without oil, without fertilizers, pesticides.

So all across the city, with a communal effort,

they turned bits of wasteland into highly productive areas for food and medicine.

They had no medicines.

So what you have now is not just a population growing its own food in the middle of a city,

but actually one of the most sophisticated, sustainable means

of organic growing of gardening, medicine on every level, in the world.

Right in the middle of the crumbling colonial grandeur,

a genuine green revolution is taking place

in the form of small, productive gardens called huertas.

These are the equivalent of our allotments but built on derelict land

and they are the basis of a new gardening culture that is sprouting up all over the city.

Alberto's huerta is typical of many in Havana.

The building that stood here collapsed, so Alberto and his brother-in-law cleared the site

and brought in the soil in wheelbarrows to build the raised beds,

even though they didn't own the land.

TRANSLATION: We took the huerta

because we came from a family of farmers.

So, when we saw the empty space here, we agreed to grow plants.

It was for a hobby, and to give produce back to the community.

When the Special Period began,

did that change the way that you gardened here?

TRANSLATION: Well, I've had to start more or less inventing.

Because the climate here changed a lot.

And because of the need, we have to grow quick-growing plants so the community could benefit.

After leaving Alberto, I realised that much of his passion for gardening

is driven by his desire to work with and for his local community.

His huerta is open and part of the street which is very different

from the private sanctuaries we like to create in our own gardens.

The urgent challenge of feeding its 11 million people during the Special Period

meant that the Cuban Regime needed to do something on a much larger scale than Alberto's huerta

so kitchen gardens, or organoponicos, were set up in the heart of urban communities.

One of the largest of these is in the suburb of Alamar on the outskirts of the city.

To me this is a sort of vision of heaven.

Wonderful vegetables grown organically.

It looks beautiful.

People all working together from the community growing them,

earning a living, eating them, caring about it.

That's the key.

If you want to do something well, you've really got to mean it.

And this place means it.

Now you might argue that this is not a garden,

but there's nothing that goes on here that doesn't happen in every garden or allotment back home,

it's just expanded out to meet a dire social need.

It's the resourcefulness of the Cuban people that have made this organic revolution work

with engineers and bureaucrats going back to the land.

Dr Funes is an agronomist and a key figure in Cuba's green revolution.

He'll introduce me to some of the people here.

Emilio! Como estas?

Monty Don de la BBC, and Emelio is an engineer.

He is in charge of pests and their control.

And what's he spraying?

I'm applying liquid and smoke.

Smoke liquid?

Yes, to control pests.

So, natural pest control.

Miguel Salcinas was one of the four men who set up the organoponico 10 years ago.

He used to work in an office but now runs this incredibly successful garden.

He has agreed to show me some of the plants and organic methods that they use here.

TRANSLATION: This is where we make the compost.

The rice beds guarantee drainage.

Ahh, the husk from rice. What do you use this for?

TRANSLATION: We use this to produce compost for seedlings.

These beds are where we make the worm humus.

Hmmm, beautiful...

Now, I don't recognize this tree or fruit, what is it?

TRANSLATION: This tree is called the Noni.

It is a plant from Central Asia and it's Latin name is Morinda citrifolia.

It's been used as a medicinal plant for 2,000 years.

According to studies at the University of Honolulu in Hawaii,

it improved the quality of life of more than 100 illnesses.

Does it taste good?

No, muy mala.

No? Is this a ripe fruit?

Sabe a queso rancido.

The ripe fruit tastes like old cheese, raw cheese.

It's like Stilton or Roquefort.

It is, believe you me,

this smells 100% of a ripe blue cheese,

which I happen to like!

And it tastes the same?

Some people used to eat it directly like this,

but most of the people used to drink the juice,

and you can reduce the flavour because sometimes it's not so well established.

Maybe for the French people it's excellent!

One of the most fascinating aspects about Alamar is that it's for city dwellers

and run by local people which has huge social benefits.

TRANSLATION: This has had a great social impact.

It has created jobs with relatively little investment.

And on the spiritual side, the city is more beautiful.

Many young people used to think agriculture is not cool

and, originally, not many people wanted to get involved.

Now, most of the people coming to us are young.

Meanwhile, in other countries there is an exodus from the field to the cities.

TRANSLATION: But here it is the other way around.

All produce from the garden is sold locally so it's fresh and wonderfully nutritious.

And because the transportation in all directions

is measured in metres not miles, the carbon trail is minimal.

I think this place is a model.

I think everything about it is completely wonderful.

If we could bring this same attitude to our back gardens back at home,

our millions of back gardens and allotments producing wonderful vegetables,

just think what that could do to change the whole structure of our approach to food.

So it's an inspiration, and it's beautiful and, OK, I'm biased, but it's a fabulous garden.

There are thousands of organoponicos throughout Cuba.

In Havana, you'll find them in the most unlikely of settings,

right in the heart of inner city communities.

Another of the factors that has made this green revolution work

is the system of support provided through a network of horticultural advice centres

to anyone who wants to garden.

This is just one of 60 CTA kiosks in Havana alone,

and the idea is to get advice and information to people,

to help them to grow their own food in gardens dotted all over the city.

And people come along, they bring problems,

they buy feeds and fertilisers, all produced organically.

And you have this network of information and support system that sustains the whole operation.

I think it's wrong to think of all gardening and all growth in Cuba as being driven to produce food.

Everywhere you go, there are plants on balconies, plants on the side of the road, there are parks,

and there are odd corners where you see the need to nurture nature

is expressed through growing ornamental plants.

You do have to look out for them.

They're not that obvious.

Gardening for personal pleasure is not that widespread.

However, I do want to try and meet some gardeners

who tend their plots just for the love of raising plants,

especially in this city that had so brilliantly tackled the desperate demands for physical sustenance.

This is an unexpected site.

A mass of greenery in the ruins of a building, and funnily enough, this reminds me of Edward James' garden.

But clearly somebody has gone to a lot of trouble,

not to just to put these here, but to look after them and keep them looking good.

Chachi runs his rickshaw business right in the heart

of this bustling part of old Havana and this is his little green oasis.

Tell me, why are you growing so many plants in your work place?

TRANSLATION: I like plants. I like them very much.

It is something I inherited from my mum.

It's like you find peace with them.

When you're watering them, caring for them, their colours entertain your mind.

It's as if you're having a conversation with them.

You're alone in a world that is just you and them.

Wherever I am, there have to be plants.

This is the last garden that I'm going to be visiting.

It belongs to a woman called Maria de los Angeles.

And she likes to grow plants that have ornamental and, I believe, spiritual value.

The first thing I notice about Maria's garden,

apart from the flowers, is that she has an amazing array of containers.

TRANSLATION: In the beginning, I started with little pots, which are very expensive.

But then, I started recycling.

Coffee pots, polystyrene tubs,

all the things you normally throw away I recycle here.

And, little by little, my idea grew.

Now, this is the first garden I've been to in Havana that isn't dominated by edible plants.

Why is that?

TRANSLATION: Initially, my project was to make

a garden of ornamental plants.

But, because of both the country's needs and my spiritual needs,

I said to myself, why not mix ornamental plants and fruit trees?

I would like to know more about how the plants fulfil your spiritual needs.

TRANSLATION: Cuba is full of very beautiful places,

but the economy doesn't allow us the luxury of visiting them.

So, we create a world at home so we don't need to spend the money

and feel happy here instead.

Plants energise me.

When I look at them,

they tell me when they need water, when they need food.

All this gives me life energy.

Vitality, for me and for my family.

Even though Maria's garden fulfils her spiritual needs,

there are plants here that are a reminder

of the crisis that Cuba still faces on a daily basis.

TRANSLATION: This banana plant helped the family

through the difficult times of the Special Period.

It has fed the family.

The little ones, everybody.

What do your neighbours and friends think about this garden?

TRANSLATION: Some people complain because it blocks the window.

Or they see it from above and say it is very beautiful and say hello every morning.

Things like that encourage me.

Attitudes are changing in our country.

The culture of plants and gardening is reawakening our appreciation

that the environment is as important to our health as any conventional therapy.

Maria's garden is interesting because it is such an exception to the general rule here in Havana.

I believe the Cubans have created a working model for the future we all face.

In the middle of a large city, with practically no money and no resources,

they are producing fresh, organic fruit and vegetables

by and for local communities, not industrially, but in the garden.

Well, with real regret I've got to leave Havana

which is the most seductive place I've ever visited in my life.

And I've been here at a time of real change,

and I'm sure that it could go either way.

Gardens could become more like Maria's,

which is conventional, very beautiful, but westernised.

Or we could learn from the extraordinary things they have achieved

and had to achieve over the last 15 years

and develop a system of using our gardens to feed ourselves on a sustainable way.

But I do know that I'll be back.

I'll be back as soon as I can, to see how those changes emerge.

Join me next time on the beach at Botany Bay,

where I'll be setting off to explore the unique flora and gardens

of Australia and New Zealand.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

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