On the Mexican leg of my sabbatical last autumn, I made the journey to visit to Las Pozas, the surrealist landscape of the English eccentric, Edward James, the heir to West Dean House in East Sussex. I had been immersed in Mexico City for a week by then, visiting the works of Luis Barragán and, as the Dia de Los Muertos approached, two friends and I took to the road. We were heading for Xilitla, a mountain town buried deep in jungle where James exiled himself in the pursuit of making this garden. A garden not as we might know it, but a lifework of minarets and fantastical spaces that manifested his singular vision.

To get there in a day was ambitious and felt far longer than its actual duration, for the landscape changing so much as we journeyed. Leaving the smog and hubbub of the sprawling city behind, we started the ten hour drive north-east towards Pachuca, passing through the agricultural plains of maize in the central valley and heading towards the Gulf of Mexico. After about four hours the flat land suddenly gave way to dry valleys scored with the cartoonish upright of cactus and ocotillo. We stopped in a layby to take in the change and witness the startling silence and enormous reach of seemingly hostile vegetation. Emerging from dust and rock, without road or habitation and completely still, bar dark raptors soaring on thermals above us.