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“WELCOME TO MOROCCO!” says the tastemaking writ-
er, botanist, and scholar Umberto Pasti gleefully as we
finally leave the main sea road south from Tangier, a
once-picturesque highway now littered with unfinished
condominiums. The doughty battered jeep has finally turned
onto a rural lane shaded by thick-trunked eucalyptus trees:
This indeed is the Morocco of a half century ago, abandoned
by the relentless urbanization that has seen the forgotten,
fly-blown city of a few hundred thousand residents expand
to a teeming conurbation of over a million inhabitants. But
here, barely an hour from Tangier’s outer reaches, Berber
women trot by on their mules, wrapped against the sun in
red-and-white striped mendil cloths and shaded with vast
straw hats. A shepherd wearing a rose-colored djellaba over
his jeans scatters goats on the pitted, stony track that rises
steeply ahead of us.
“They say that if you sleep under a tree, the jennun—rural
spirits—will get into your mind,” says Pasti. He should
know: Some 20 years ago a local friend promised to take
him to a place undisturbed by nazrani (foreigners), and
he was intrigued enough to go. After a day on a deserted
beach he decided to brave the hour-long walk up the steep
hill. Exhausted at the end of his trek, he fell asleep under
a spreading fig and awoke to see an Edenic landscape of
plunging hills and valleys, ringing with goat bells and the
distant crashing waves of the Atlantic. “I will stay here,”
said Pasti, and before long he had acquired two acres of
rocky high ground and called his partner, the Milan-based
fashion designer Stephan Janson, to announce an imminent
move to the village of Rohuna.
Luckily they maintained their fabled establishment in
Tangier, for in this uncharted land there was to be no water
for three years and no electricity for five. To realize his Fitzcar-
raldian vision in this spot lashed alternately by the charqui (east
wind) and ghdiga (sea wind), Pasti hired practically everyone
in the surrounding areas (some 600
people) to build retaining walls and
terraces, bring in tons of rich topsoil
on a convoy of mules, and lay the
bones of a series of gardens. In the
process he built a road, dug a well
for running water, brought teachers
and pediatric doctors to the isolated
area, and nurtured a generation of
organic gardeners.
Today, a second generation of
gardeners—named Nabil, Lotfi,
Hamidou, Chinioui, and Hisham—
tends the land with skill and pride. (The gardens are mostly
named for them.) Pasti, who speaks the local vernacular and
reels off the Latin names of his plants as though they were
old friends, gave his gardeners playful briefs that delighted
and inspired them: Lotfi’s garden, for instance, is exotic,
with succulents growing amid a tropical orchard; while
Nabil’s terraced gardens are inspired by an imaginary dil-
ettante plant collector in eighteenth-century Portugal and
a drunken Englishman with classicist instincts. The palm-
frond hut that a local shepherd made for Pasti’s earliest visits
became a one-room summer-house dormitory chockablock
“They say that if
you sleep under
a tree the
jennun—rural
spirits—will get
into your mind”
