When Francisco Cervantes de Salazar arrived in Mexico in 1551, he wrote about Moctezuma Xocoyotzin and his gardens in the Chronicle of the Conquest of New Spain:
"The gardens were only gardens of herbs, medicinal and fragrant, flowers, roses, and fragrant trees, of which there were many. He ordered his doctors to experiment with those herbs and to cure the knights of his court, with the most known and experienced ones. The gardens gave great pleasure to those who entered them, for the variety of flowers and roses they had and for the fragrance and good smell they gave off, especially in the morning and in the afternoon.
Five hundred years have passed since that chronicle, and the truth is that the city still retains some of that grandiloquent man-nature syncretism. Before the Great Tenochtitlan fell, the Aztecs honored the fauna and flora that surrounded them not only for their infinite cosmogonic value, but also for their beauty and usefulness. Moctezuma Xocoyotzin was one of the first botanical visionaries and under his reign gardens and orchards flourished; while his people became erudite about the medicinal and toxicological properties of various plants. He also procured other spaces such as the Peñón de los Baños park, the Huaxtepec garden and the Ahuehuetes de Chapultepec forest; reserves whose splendor was engraved in the memories of the time.
Unfortunately, the novo-Hispanic period wiped out most of the Mexica hedens; however, one still survives and is considered a fundamental pillar of modern Mexico City: Chapultepec Forest. In its first section resides the Botanical Garden, a place that shelters those mythological "old men of the water" that Xocoyotzin sought so much. Some of these ahuehuetes are more than 300 years old and, sadly, they will have to experience -once again- the extinction of their environment, as the garden is about to die.
Inaugurated in 2006, just a few steps away from the Museum of Contemporary Art and right in front of the Tamayo Museum is the Chapultepec Botanical Garden; a protected area of 5 hectares that houses 300 species of plants, both endemic and introduced, as well as a greenhouse of 500 square meters. This space was conceived with the intention of spreading the great botanical, climatological and agricultural richness of the country, but, perhaps a little unintentionally, it ended up becoming an authentic sanctuary for contemplation, replacing the gray of the capital's asphalt with the green of its orchards and bushes.
More than 30 plant families are exhibited, including domestic plants (ornamental, medicinal and food plants), wetlands, grasslands, agaves and succulents, as well as cacti (one measuring more than 10 meters), arid zone plants and flowering plants. The greenhouse -one of the oldest structures on the site- has barrel-domed stained glass windows and spherical domes, as well as mosaics arranged in the art deco style of the forties. This site is especially humid as it is home to an important collection of orchids, the mythical erotic flower of the Greeks.
In 2016, and then in 2018, the association Plantando con Causa was in charge of rehabilitating the Chapultepec Botanical Garden; however, little remains of those bees that announced the pollinator section and of the pond that received visitors, as it is known that the current capital administration seeks to replace this space with an artistic pavilion, which is part of the project Chapultepec: Nature and Culture.
Recently, the Ministry of Culture announced that the Italian architect Renzo Piano, architect of the Pompidou Center in France and the Maison Hermés in Tokyo, will be in charge of the conceptual design of the new Mexican Contemporary Pavilion. It is not named as a museum, but it is: it will have temporary exhibition halls dedicated to diverse disciplines such as architecture, design, photography and plastic arts. It is offered as a "light construction" that will not affect the green areas of the site, but it will end up with the structure of the orchid garden. The idea is that the Botanical Garden and all its ecosystems will move to the second section of the Bosque, although horticulturists and biologists assure that many species will not even resist the trip.
The ahuehuetes can live up to 500 years, and tell their story and everyone's story through the wrinkles on their trunks. Immobile guardians of the chapulin hill, they have helplessly witnessed the destruction of their ancestral home. That botanical paradise that Montezuma once dreamed of, and that today is on the verge of extinction. The Chapultepec Botanical Garden is open from Tuesday to Sunday, from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm, and the orchid garden closes even earlier, before noon. Admission is completely free.