©Ngoc Minh Ngo
Tbarek Allah Garden
Morocco
The garden surrounds the three pavilions of the villa, the one at the top, the one in the middle, and the one at the bottom, built between 1930 and 2000. It is located on the Nouvelle Montagne, the residential hill overlooking Tangier and the bay, and faces south. Due to the steep difference in altitude, it was organized into a dozen terraces supported by stone walls. It is a shade garden, where the old trees and the density of the plantings allow you to grow tropical plants, which normally would not thrive in the Moroccan climate.
The most important collections it houses are of ferns, begonias, araliaceae and shade palms. Flowers are scarce, the emphasis is placed on the contrasts between the different greens and the shapes and structures of the foliage. The narrow paths, the contact with the large leaves that touch the visitor, the swaying of the suspended epiphytic plants, heighten the sensation of being an explorer in a corner of the forest that could be painted by Douanier Rousseau.
A pair of fountains covered in sixteenth-century Andalusian tiles, and various scented plants (white brugmansias, nocturnal cisterns, jasmines) enrich this aesthetic experience with a sound and olfactory dimension. The most definitive sensation you get when getting lost in the garden of Tbarek Allah, contemplating the vast pool surrounded by walls and similar to a wash house, is that time stopped a hundred years ago. The contemporary world, with its noises and smells, is strictly excluded from this garden.
Tbarek Allah Garden
Centre of Tangeri, Morocco
Garden open by appointment
