The John Fairey Garden Location

Brujería is the traditional folk magic of Mexico. In addition to stories, spirits, spells, and spiritual cleansing, there is an element of alchemy: the turning of natural substances into other substances.

John Fairy was an alchemist, and to that extent, a brujo. Using elements of the Mexican and southwestern flora he made a one-of-a-kind garden. Like all gardens, it took more than wizardry to create an experience BUT it was no less magical. The John Fairey Garden (renamed from Peckerwood Gardens to honor its recently deceased founder), makes political and other boundaries disappear with the sleight-of-hand of horticulture.

“The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper,” wrote poet

W. B. Yeats. Fairey was adept at recognizing those enchantments and using them to conjure a new reality. The Texas garden has the United States’ premier collection of plants from Mexico in its holdings, with plants from other countries that are suitable bedfellows.

A true plantsperson’s garden since its very beginning, the John Fairey Garden sprang from its founder’s artistic talent and the passion for horticultural exploration—and an eye for both. In addition to being trained as a painter and teaching design to architects for decades, Fairey the plant explorer made over 100 trips into Mexico to search out little-used or unknown plant material suitable for gardens of the Southwest.

Fairey’s goal was to create a cultural bridge between Mexico and the United States, and to highlight the richness of the horticultural heritage of the region—and the threat to its continued existence in either country. As a result, the garden is internationally known for its collection of rare and endangered plants and is home to important collections of Mexican and Texan natives, oaks, Mahonia, and woody lilies (Agave, Manfreda, Yucca, and related taxa). Its work has been called “monumentally important” to botany and horticulture.

Collectors’ gardens are notoriously difficult from a design perspective. Often they are defined by the “drifts of one” concept. Artists’ gardens are often no more comprehensible. “They have to remake the world around them,” says landscape architect Mark Kane in the foreword to the book Artists in Their Gardens by Valerie Easton and David Laskin. It is especially significant then, that among his many national awards for horticultural excellence, Fairey was the recipient of the 2016 Place Maker Award from the Foundation for Landscape Studies.

Fairey’s love of art remains part of the equation. Amid the thousands of specimens of plants, is a collection of distinctive sculptures. He also amassed a significant collection of Mexican folk art and donated a portion, over 400 pieces, to the Art Museum of Southeast Texas.

The Garden Conservancy was involved early in its existence to assist in the transition to a public garden, and helped form the Peckerwood Garden Conservation Foundation, a nonprofit organization to own and operate it. Over the years, the Garden Conservancy has provided guidance and resources, to the John Fairey Garden Conservation Foundation (the garden’s current owner), and continues to steward the conservation easement it holds, which protects the garden in perpetuity. Most recently, the Garden Conservancy awarded a Gardens for Good grant to the John Fairey Garden for ongoing management and protection of the collection.

Even if plants recognized boundaries, the John Fairey Garden magically erases them, combining disparate elements from botany, horticulture, landscape architecture, design, culture, art, and geography, into a transcendent whole. In the process—and for all of us—it creates a limpia, a spiritual cleansing that clears negative energy from body, emotions, mind, and soul.