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with Victorian brass beds. Pasti eventually built a house,
hewn—like the garden’s retaining walls—from the local
ocher-colored stone: He wanted something that looked as
though it had always been there.
As Tangier continued its inexorable tread toward ur-
banization and expansion, Pasti’s vision for his gardens
took on a new urgency. “Every year we have two or three
species that disappear,” he explains of the flora lost to
developments. An additional 180 or so are threatened—a
sad fate for a landscape that once had one of the highest
concentrations of flowers on the Mediterranean coast.
“Sadly there’s a need for something like Rohuna for a
botanical preserve.” Pasti’s passion turned into a mission.
Before an imposing new sports stadium was constructed
over fields of native Iris tingitana, for example, Pasti and
his team spent “three winters in the mud” salvaging the
bulbs that now blanket the hillside in a wash of Matisse
blue every January and February. When a new motorway
was being carved through the local countryside, they set
off to gather the wild narcissus and replanted hundreds of
bulbs. He saved a Pistacia atlantica that had fallen victim
to the widening of a road in Marrakech, rockroses about to
suffer a similar fate in Tangier, and a brace of 300-year-old
olives uprooted by an apartment building. As the gardens’
renown spread, the immensely knowledgeable Moroccan
botanical community rallied in support.
Four years ago the Belgian botanist Bernard Dogimont
came to visit and proved every bit as passionate as Pasti.
In fact, Dogimont was so besotted with the gardens that
he never left, and under his expert aegis they have risen to
new heights, nurtured by his expertise in organic cultivation
and nonpareil knowledge of plants. The gardens, which
now showcase some 800 species, are exquisitely revealed in
a new book, Eden Revisited: A Garden in Northern Morocco
(Rizzoli), out in September, with photographs by Ngoc
Minh Ngo (included here). Ngo traveled a dozen times to
document the place through the seasons. “I think Ngoc
loves this garden as much as I do,” says Pasti.
Pasti is building a dining pavilion for visitors; proceeds
will be used to sustain the gardens. In his ongoing mission
to banish plastics—everything from detritus on the beach to
disposable playthings—he has asked the local grandmothers
to teach their grandchildren how to make the wooden toys
that the elderly women played with as children. The delight-
ful results, sold in Marrakech, London, Madrid, and Milan,
have raised additional funds for the local community, and
Pasti plans to build a museum to showcase the originals,
his astonishing collection of shepherd’s sticks, and the
painted furniture of the Jbala peoples of the Western Riff
mountainous region.“The problem is that I always have
ideas,” says Pasti with his impish laugh. “We are still in the
expansion phase!” @
THE RED ROOM
An outdoor sitting area is enshrouded by
spindly euphorbia plants and palm plants
in Hamidou’s Garden. “The onset of shade
in a place that has never known it,” says
Pasti, “has unpredictable consequences.”