Tuesday, August 14, 2012

a wild garden


"Wild thing
You make my heart sing;
You make everything groovy."

-- Chip Taylor


New Orleans' Longue Vue Gardens is appropriately named, for the site possesses a dozen or more ingeniously constructed mini-gardens laid out so that numerous resulting “long views” through several gardens at a time exist throughout the property. And of course the main “long view” – up to the main house – should rank among the most spectacularly-designed entry gardens in the U.S.


Longue Vue House and Gardens was the brainchild of Edgar and Edith Stern, who had the home built and grounds landscaped back in the 1930s. They hired nationally-renowned landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman to design the gardens. Beginning in 1935 with the spaces immediately surrounding the house, Shipman worked her way outward, and by 1939 had finally made it to a quiet, one-acre space at the northwestern corner of the property, adjacent to the 17th Street Canal dividing Orleans parish and Old Metairie. Here, using a fine brick pigeonaire as an aesthetic anchor, Shipman created Longue Vue's Wild Garden via a geometrically-simple pathway system that effectively divided the garden into several hefty segments.



Legendary Louisiana artist/writer/naturalist Caroline Dormon was called in to consult with Shipman on the Wild Garden's planting selections. And over the succeeding years several additional Louisiana native plant garden specialists have been called in to provide input there, beginning with Richard and Jessie Johnson, founders of the Louisiana Native Plant Society, and hand-picked successors at Dormon's beloved “Briarwood” (now known as The Caroline Dormon Nature Preserve) just north of Natchitoches.



I first visited Longue Vue's Wild Garden in the late 1990s, and over time was privileged to collaborate with a succession of three of the facility's Head Gardeners in providing design options and planting selections during the Wild Garden's crazy pre-/post-Katrina years. My last interaction came just several weeks post-Katrina (2005) when I was contacted by Head Gardener Amy Graham to come out and assess the damage and provide replacement plantings.


a bank of wild aster has naturalized
on the right side of this path


Salt-marsh mallow blooms (above) mingle with
black-eyed susan (below)

Amy, who's still serving as Longue Vue's Head Gardener, as well as her predassessors Ann Donnelly and Marcela Linero (Singleton), were all keen on native wildlife-attracting plants – a lucky happenstance for a guy like me. During that last-go-round in the wake of Katrina, I focused on seed/berry/nectar-producing natives, installing mid- to small-sized trees such as American hornbeam, red mulberry, rough-leaf dogwood, sweetbay magnolia, red bay, yaupon holly, and deciduous holly, shrubs such as American beautyberry, arrowwood viburnum, little-leaf viburnum, dwarf palmetto, and wax myrtle, as well as wildflowers such as salt-marsh mallow, black-eyed susan, indian pink, asters, irises, turk's cap, St. Andrew's cross, and others.


Tyrone Foreman (pictured) and I took shelter in the pigeonaire and
caught up on old times during a brief rain shower......behind Tyrone
is a young speciman of needle palm (Rhapidophyllum hystrix), a rare
native, endemic to pine flatwoods in the southernmost parts of South Carolina,
Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi

These photos were taken on a recent visit to the Wild Garden, where I serendipitously ran into old friend Tyrone Foreman, a well known Louisiana native plant advocate, and Susan Norris-Davis, both of whom have been carrying out the main maintenance duties there for the past several years. New Orleans birder Wendy Rihner conducts seasonal birding tours through the Wild Garden. Her next tour is scheduled for September 22. Check the Longue Vue House and Gardens website for more info.

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