JARDIN MAJORELLE

There's a blue in Marrakesh that doesn't belong to the desert, the mosques, or the medina walls — it belongs to one man, and it's impossible to unsee once you've stood in it. In 1937, French painter Jacques Majorelle mixed a shade of ultramarine so specific he patented it under his own name, and used it to paint the walls of the studio inside the garden he'd spent over a decade building on the edge of the palm grove.

He filled it with plants gathered from five continents — bamboo from China, cacti from Mexico, water lilies, palms — and for forty years, it was his obsession more than his home. After his death, the garden fell into ruin, nearly bulldozed for a hotel complex, until two Frenchmen with very different kinds of fame saved it in 1980: Yves Saint Laurent and Pierre Bergé.

They didn't just restore it — they moved in next door, and when Saint Laurent died in 2008, his ashes were scattered in the rose garden of the Villa Oasis next door, and a Roman column raised in his memory stands in the garden. What you're walking through, then, isn't really a garden. It's a love letter two men wrote to a color, left open for the public to read.