Aztec pleasure gardens

Doris Heyden, a renowned expert who died in 2005, spells out in the opening to her classic book Mythology and Symbolism of Flora in Pre-Hispanic Mexico the importance of flowers in ancient Mexico, representing as they did life, death, gods, creation, humans, language, song and art, friendship, stateliness, warrior captives, war itself, sky, earth... and an important calendar sign. Flowers accompanied humans from conception and birth to death and burial: clearly the flower was ‘one of the basic elements in the art of pre-Hispanic language - like the quetzal feather and the jade bead, it was the essence of something “precious”’.

Pic 1: Ancient stone flowers may well have ornamented temples or the homes of nobles

As metaphors, flowers become both verb and adjective, filling Aztec time and space. Flowers were often used to evoke the power of gods to ‘paint [sacred books], to grant colour and life to those that have to inhabit the earth’. ‘Flower and song’ were, in the words of a celebrated poet azo tle nelli in tlalticpac - ‘perhaps the only true things on Earth’. One of many Aztec paradises - Tlalocan - consisted, in Soustelle’s words, of ‘an idealised vision of the eastern tropics, a green country of flowers and warm rain; it was a garden of repose and plenty, where the blessed lived for ever in peaceful happiness’ (Pic 3).

Pic 3: Men chase a butterfly in Tlalocan, earthly paradise, painting by Miguel Covarrubias of a Teotihuacan palace mural

Creating and developing a garden was a well respected pastime for the Aztec/Mexica élite, highly organised with teams of professional gardeners - who linked their expert knowledge of plants to the sacred calendar - and made possible by the accumulated wealth of the Aztec state. Writing of one of the many palaces that so astounded the Spanish with its beauty, Susan Toby Evans explains some of the ‘nitty-gritty’ behind the scenes:-
Labour crews performing tribute obligations built the place, dug the ponds, plastered them, brought the stone and timbers and plants - all of this magnificence was paid for by the Aztec empire. And the design... reveals how Aztec [rulers] were kept in contact with affairs of state - canals brought canoes directly to the palaces... just as limousines and helicopters today ferry executive officers of business and government from one important meeting to another.
So highly developed and regulated was the art of gardening that strict laws preventing commoners from growing (or picking) certain flowers helped the nobility to display their rank and privileges in a direct (and colourful) way...

Pic 5: Chicomecóatl, goddess of maize and fertility alongside extensive chinampa ‘floating gardens’ - part of a mural by Diego Rivera, National Palace, Mexico City, 1945

The Aztecs themselves clearly appreciated the mental and physical benefits that a flower garden brings:-
It freshen things. It germinates in all places; it becomes green. It makes things lovely in all places... It spreads constantly blossoming, extending its flowers. [The plants] are watered, sprinkled. It is a very good place, a reedy place, a desirable place, a constantly sought place, a coveted place, a joyous place. (Florentine Codex Book XI)

Pic 7: Detail from the Historia Tolteca-Chicimeca, folio 35a

Moctezuma II kept three pleasure gardens - at his Tenochtitlan palace, as part of the cypress park and hanging gardens at Chapultepec, and at Iztapalapa. In his second letter to Charles V, in 1520, Cortés described the palace garden of Cuitlahuac (Moctezuma’s brother) at Iztapalapa in glowing terms:-

There are... very refreshing gardens with many trees and sweet-scented flowers, bathing places of fresh water, well constructed and having steps leading down to the bottom. [There was also] a large orchard near the house overlooked by a high terrace with many beautiful corridors and rooms. Within the orchard is a great square pool of fresh water, very well constructed, with sides of handsome masonry, around which runs a walk with a well-laid pavement of tiles, so wide that four persons can walk abreast on it, and 400 paces square, making in all 1,600 paces. On the other side of this promenade toward the wall of the garden are hedges of lattice work made of cane, behind which are all sorts of plantations of trees and aromatic herbs. The pool contains many fish and different kinds of waterfowl.

Pic 9: The rain god Tlaloc, painting by Miguel Covarrubias from a mural in a building at Tetitla, Teotihuacan

The hilltop gardens of the poet-king Netzahualcóyotl of Texcoco at Tetzcotzinco proved legendary, and were later to inspire the not-to-be-outdone Mexica ruler Moctezuma I to create the ‘botanical’ gardens at Huaxtepec. The native chronicler Ixtlilxochitl (himself descended from Netzahualcóyotl) gave a rich description of the former:-

These parks and gardens were adorned with rich and sumptuously ornamented alcazars (summerhouses) with their fountains, their irrigation channels, their canals, their lakes and their bathing-places and wonderful mazes, where he had had a great variety of flowers planted and trees of all kinds, foreign and brought from distant parts... and the water intended for the fountains, pools and channels for watering the flowers and trees in this park came from its spring: to bring it, it had been necessary to build strong, high, cemented walls of unbelievable size, going from one mountain to the other with an aqueduct on top which came out at the highest part of the park.

Pic 11: The remains of the hilltop gardens at Tetzcotzinco

Though rather quaint, this picture of the gardens at Tetzcotzinco is supported by the remains of the empty reservoirs, the aqueduct, the steps and the terraces. Susan Toby Evans has updated the description, and provided a useful graphic of the site (pic 12):-

The whole hill-sized sculptural and architectural masterpiece was transformed into a fountain by bringing a stream of water from a spring higher in the mountains to a point near the top of the hill by constructing a solid aqueduct nearly 8 km (nearly 5 miles) long, in places nearly 50 m (some 150 feet) high. The flow of water rushed down the hill in a set of ingenious channels, forming waterfalls and filling three rock-cut circular baths, watering gardens of exotic plants, and eventually feeding the terraced agricultural fields below.

Pic 13: Xochiquetzal, goddess of fertility and vegetation, and patron of pleasure, love and flowers... Codex Magliabecchiano folio 62r

By the time the Spanish came on the scene, the gardens had spread over 7 miles in circumference and held some 2,000 species of herbs, shrubs and trees. Cortés claimed these were the ‘finest, pleasantest and largest’ gardens he had ever seen:-

A very pretty rivulet [stream] with high banks ran through it from one end to the other. For the distance of two shots from a crossbow there were arbors [shady spots] and refreshing gardens and an infinite number of different kinds of fruit trees; many herbs and sweet-scented flowers. It certainly filled one with admiration to see the grandeur and exquisite beauty of this entire orchard.

Pic 15: Model ‘chinampas’ (Aztec ‘floating gardens’ at Xochimilco), National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City

Info sources/further reading:-
• Clark, Phil A Flower Lover’s Guide to Mexico, Minutiae Mexicana, Mexico City 1972
• Velasco Lozano, Ana María L. & Nagao, Debra ‘Mitología y Simbolismo de las Flores’, Las Flores en el México Prehispánico, Arqueología Mexicana, Vol. XIII, no. 78, March-April 2006
• Heyden, Doris Mitología y Simbolismo de la Flora en el México Prehispánico, UNAM, Mexico City 1983
• Toby Evans, Susan Ancient Mexico & Central America: Archaeology and Culture History, Thames & Hudson, London 2004
• Phillips, Charles & Jones, David M. The Everyday Life of the Aztec & Maya, Anness Publishing, London 2007
• Soustelle, Jacques Daily Life of the Aztecs, Stanford University Press, California 1961
• Sahagún, Bernardo de Florentine Codex, Books 8 & 11, translated by Arthur J.O. Anderson and Charles E. Dibble, School of American Research and University of Utah, Santa Fe, New Mexico 1979
• León-Portilla, Miguel ‘Las Flores en la Poesía Náhuatl’, Las Flores en el México Prehispánico, Arqueología Mexicana, Vol. XIII, no. 78, March-April 2006
• Díaz del Castillo, Bernal The History of the Conquest of New Spain, edited by Davíd Carrasco, University of New Mexico Press, 2008

Pic 17: Marigolds - always at the heart of Day of the Dead festival decorations and displays (here at Coyoacán, Mexico City)