The story of how Edward James (1907-84), the millionaire poet, painter and patron to the Surrealists, escaped to Mexico to build a garden in the jungle has often been told. The famously eccentric James – known for boiling his paper clips in eau de cologne for fear of germs – moved to Mexico in the late 1930s to escape judgemental English high society after the collapse of his marriage to the dancer Tilly Losch.

There, on a hillside deep in the Sierra Madre jungle, outside the town of Xilitla, James spent 40 years building Las Pozas (The Pools), a name that refers to the focal point of the garden – nine pools filled by a natural waterfall. Here James designed and built a sprawling Surrealist-inspired garden full of large, colourful sculptures and more than 30 fanciful concrete structures, some over 100ft high, where James lived intermittently surrounded by pet ocelots and boa constrictors.