It is reported that the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo kept almighty gardens. She painted furiously, slept with many, and loved passionately.
In her Mexico City gardens love affairs started, ended, and walls of bougainvillea bloomed. Frida’s husband was the hero muralist Diego Rivera and their marriage was squarely non-traditional. Frida loved Diego, and Diego loved most women. But then Leon Trotsky knocked at their door, but it isn’t cool to gossip.
The garden at La Casa Azul thrived under Frida’s guidance and for some time a sort of calm descended over her house.
This lush private world is reflected in Frida’s paintings from the time, those like Self-Portrait with Bonito (1941), Self Portrait with Monkeys (1943) and Roots (1943). The famous Bonito was in fact Frida’s pet parrot and the monkeys were a duo of spider monkeys, Fulang Chang and Camito de Guayabal. Together with an eagle by the name of Gertrudis Caca Blanca (Gertrude White Shit), Granizo the deer and a hairless Mexican dog called Señor Xolotl, they roamed the gardens freely.
Most love stories can be reduced to a three-word potted history: he loved her or she loved him; they loved wildly, or they had sex. In Frida and Diego’s case the love was traumatic and the story more complex. It involved many women and many men, Leon Trotsky not the least amongst them. The story of Frida, Diego and Leon is perhaps best told as a story of three iconic gardens in Mexico City, all of them still very much alive and growing today.
