What are the best gardens to visit in Morocco?

Gardens are central to Moroccan and Islamic culture — the walled garden as a vision of paradise, all shade, water and scent against the heat — and Morocco has some of the most beautiful you'll ever walk through. For garden lovers, and frankly for anyone needing a green pause from the intensity of the medinas, they're a joy. Marrakech is the garden capital, but there are gems across the country.

The famous one is the Jardin Majorelle in Marrakech: the painter Jacques Majorelle's 1920s creation, later saved by Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé, where electric cobalt-blue buildings (the colour is literally called "Majorelle blue") set off cacti, bamboo, palms and lily ponds. It's small and very popular, so go early, and pair it with the superb adjoining Yves Saint Laurent Museum and the Berber Museum. Quieter and equally lovely is Le Jardin Secret, a restored historic riad garden in the heart of the medina with a classic Islamic chahar bagh layout and an exotic garden, plus a tower view.

For the historic, royal scale, the Menara Gardens give you a vast olive grove and a still reflecting basin with a green-roofed pavilion and the High Atlas snows behind it — a postcard image of Marrakech and a peaceful walk. The 12th-century Agdal Gardens, also Marrakech, are immense royal orchards and pools. Beyond Marrakech, Rabat's Andalusian Gardens inside the Kasbah des Oudayas are a fragrant, intimate delight above the river, and Marrakech's ANIMA garden by Austrian artist André Heller is a more recent, dreamlike art-garden out toward the Atlas.

A few more worth knowing: the Mamounia hotel's historic gardens are sublime even if you only go for a mint tea, the cactus and palm collections at places like Cactus Thiemann reward enthusiasts, and many of the finest riads have their own perfect courtyard gardens you'll live in daily. If gardens are your passion, build the trip around spring (March–May), when the roses of the Dades Valley's "Valley of Roses" bloom and the countryside is green — and let me weave the great gardens of Marrakech and Rabat into your route.