Mr Madison Cox is a celebrated garden designer whose clients include the hotelier Mr Ian Schrager, businessman and politician Mr Michael Bloomberg and the late Princess Marella Agnelli, wife of the Fiat chairman Mr Gianni Agnelli. He is talking to MR PORTER over a screen-free telephone line (it’s very 2019) that connects us to his home in Tangier, northern Morocco. The subject of our conversation is the Majorelle Garden in Marrakech (captured in our exclusive shoot), which Mr Cox runs as president of the Fondation Jardin Majorelle.

The Majorelle is an urban oasis, located in what was originally a palm forest on the edge of Marrakech, in the south of Morocco. No garden in the world is more keenly associated with the fashion industry, thanks to its previous owners, Mr Pierre Bergé and his partner, the iconic French designer Mr Yves Saint Laurent. The city is built in a desert on the edge of the Atlas Mountains and in high summer the daytime temperature frequently exceeds 40°C. But step off the baking pavement into the garden, a large shady retreat full of ponds, palms, cacti, bamboo and bougainvillea, and everything changes.

“When you walk off the street, there’s a relief, coolness – a sense of refuge from the harshness of the outside world,” says Cox. “Also, the sound is incredible because it’s become a refuge for birds and early in the morning or late afternoon, they start congregating. It’s a garden of textures, shapes and forms. It’s a very graphic garden.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, Marrakech was the destination of choice for the more bohemian members of the jet set (think Mr John Paul Getty Jr and The Rolling Stones) and Saint Laurent and Bergé were important members of that scene. Evocative photos from the era show the designer lounging in a white kaftan, but he and Bergé did not establish the garden – it was founded by Mr Jacques Majorelle.

In 1979, Cox was a young San Franciscan living and studying at Parsons in Paris when he first visited the garden. The Majorelle was striking, but unkempt. “I came to Marrakech to spend a long weekend at Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé’s house as a guest,” he says.

Four decades later, the first impression made by the garden remains vivid. “It was extremely romantic, very overgrown and there were very few visitors. It was a rendezvous for mischievous…” Cox considers his words. “It was a place Moroccans could meet. The walkways were poorly kept and the structures were quite dilapidated, but it had a romance. It was very poetic. What was there, that remains, is this extraordinary collection of plants, palm trees and especially cacti and succulent plants that Majorelle collected over the decades.”

Jacques Majorelle was a painter from northern France who travelled to Morocco in 1917 to recover from tuberculosis. His father was Mr Louis Majorelle, a leading figure in the art nouveau movement. When he bought a plot of land in Marrakech, he was leaving behind a life of high European sophistication, as well as the trauma of WWI.

“Over the decades, he developed a planto-mania,” says Cox. “First, plants from Morocco, then from north Africa and South Africa, and then other parts of the world that had similar growing conditions [to Marrakech]: Central America, Latin America, Mexico, Arizona and New Mexico.”

Saint Laurent and Bergé first visited Marrakech in 1966. “They fell in love with it,” Cox says. “On their first trip, they bought a modest house in the Medina. It was warm. It was exotic. It was north Africa; there was no mass tourism.”

The city became a second home for the couple, who continued to work together even after their romantic union ended. “They would come in the winter and in the summer. It was here that Saint Laurent did his fashion sketches. He’d stay three or four weeks and would return to Paris to create the next collection.”

In 1975, the couple bought Villa Oasis, a private property next to Jardin Majorelle and, in 1980, they bought the garden, too. Following Bergé’s death, Cox was appointed president of both the Fondation Jardin Majorelle and the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent, which has museums in Paris and Marrakech.

When it comes to the Majorelle, the intention in 2021, Cox says, is “to preserve it”. But how do you preserve something that’s changing all the time? Is the intention to keep everything the same as it was when Majorelle was in charge? “I’m not making radical changes,” says Cox. “But there’s constant evolution. I’ve hired Marc Jeanson, a brilliant young botanist, to exhibit and identify the plants. The Majorelle is in a constant state of flux and part of that now is to be more sensitive about transmitting information about our fragile natural world.”

As a garden designer, Cox is highly attuned to environmental concerns and sustainability. He’s keenly aware that Marrakech is a desert city and that water is in short supply. He made the decision to remove the lawns from the Majorelle because of the water required to maintain them. “We want to use the garden as a learning tool,” he says. “Because we are in a desert environment, there are these issues of climate change and of water. We had a lot of resistance from the gardeners because there’s a lot of prestige about having a lawn in Marrakech. It means you can pay for the water required to keep it green.”

The green lawns have gone, but another bold colour, the unforgettable shade of cobalt blue you can see in our pictures, continues to define the garden. Mr Majorelle painted his cubist house this colour in the 1940s. “Majorelle felt the blue had an almost magical power, that white was too blinding because of the sun’s glare and that Marrakech pink [an ochre shade] wasn’t a strong enough contrast against the green of the cactus. This was all done before Yves Klein Blue.” This refers to International Klein Blue, a colour registered by the French artist Mr Yves Klein in 1960.

The Moroccan climate doesn’t just affect plants and trees. It also affects humans. How does Cox cope with the heat? “They say Morocco is a cold country where the sun is hot,” he says. “The temperature fluctuates massively. In January, you can be in the pool at lunchtime and light the fire in the evening because it’s so cold. I start the day with a polo shirt, a cardigan and a scarf. As the day progresses, I peel those layers off and as the day ends, I put them on again. Unlike a lot of people, I expose less skin in the summer because the sun can be incredibly harsh. You see that with the Moroccans, who wear a djellaba robe. It keeps the body heat down.”

Until the pandemic struck, most of the garden’s 1.5 million annual visitors were international tourists. But since September last year, that has changed. “Many locals are discovering that we exist,” says Mr Cox, “that we’re a refuge where you can take things down a notch.” The human wish for escape plays a vital role in the story of Jardin Majorelle, which first captured the imagination of Majorelle, then Bergé and Saint Laurent and then Cox, all of them visitors to Morocco. It seems appropriate that in 2021 the people of Marrakech are finding it for themselves.