How to rotate a Contextily basemap in matplotlib and Jupyter notebook

I asked this question on Stack Overflow because I thought the Jupyter Notebook and matplotlib aspects were better suited for that forum, but I didn’t have any luck; it is also a geopandas and contextily question, so I think it is applicable here, too.

I am making a set of figures with subplots in Jupyter Notebook using matplotlib and geopandas. The top plots (A & B) have geospatial data and use various basemaps (aerial imagery, shaded relief, etc.). How can I rotate the top two plots 90-degrees, so that they are elongated?

(I will need to redo gridspec layout of course, but that is easy; what I don’t know how to do is: rotate the plots but keep the geographic information for basemap plotting.)

Repeatable code is below.

import pandas as pd
import geopandas as gpd
%matplotlib inline 
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.gridspec as gridspec
import contextily as ctx
from shapely.geometry import Point
plt.style.use('seaborn-whitegrid')

### DUMMY DATA
long, lat = [(-118.155, -118.051, -118.08), (38.89, 39.512, 39.1)]
q, t = [(0, 70500, 21000), (0, 8000, -1200)]
df = pd.DataFrame(list(zip(q, t, lat, long)), columns =['q', 't', 'lat', 'long'])
gdf = gpd.GeoDataFrame(df, geometry=gpd.points_from_xy(df['long'], df['lat']))
gdf.crs = "EPSG:4326"

### PLOTTING
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,7.5), constrained_layout=True)
gs = fig.add_gridspec(3, 2)
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(gs[0:2, 0])
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(gs[0:2, 1], sharex = ax1, sharey = ax1)
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(gs[-1, :])

### PlotA
gdf.plot(ax = ax1)
ctx.add_basemap(ax1, crs='epsg:4326', source=ctx.providers.Esri.WorldShadedRelief)
ax1.set_aspect('equal')
ax1.set_title('Plot-A')
ax1.tick_params('x', labelrotation=90)

### PlotB
gdf.plot(ax = ax2)
ctx.add_basemap(ax2, crs='epsg:4326', source=ctx.providers.Esri.WorldImagery, alpha=0.5)
ax2.set_aspect('equal')
ax2.set_title('Plot-B')
ax2.tick_params('x', labelrotation=90)

### PlotC
ax3.scatter(df.q, df.t)
ax3.set_aspect('equal')
ax3.set_title('Plot-C')
ax3.set_xlabel('q')
ax3.set_ylabel('t')