I looked for a preceding surrealist garden on the Internet, and this was the one whose name I saw most frequently. A book about this garden is also available at the library.
http://www.eyeconart.net/mexico/pozas.htm
http://www.mexico-with-heart.com/places/edward-james-las-pozas.html
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Fascinating! The fact that it’s an ENGLISHMAN ‘lost in the jungle’ who comes up with Surrealist visions reminds me of the journey of Stephens to the Yucatan (http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/maya/travel.html is a nice PBS site introducing the book). Stephens had an artist to draw the Mayan ruins he saw there, but the effect was totally Surreal in the sense that the architecture and its decorations were wild. Seems as if Westerners + ancient cultures = Surrealism. The Rousselian formula still holds (‘the gapped circle’). A restricted passage, something like an initiation experience, leads to an expanded field of vision and imagination. The ‘Surreal’ part is not so much the fantastic quality of the visions but the whole method of passage: using travel to de-familiarize the world to the extent that the imagination and objects ‘meet halfway’.