Big Easy Urban Jungle

We dwell in an‘urban jungle’ called New Orleans.  However, my favorite place to be when I’m here is far from the concrete jungle, it is sitting in Nancy’s delightful garden uptown.  All the photos throughout this blog, except when noted, are of Nancy’s garden so you will understand why I spend so much time over there.   This is a photo of me at Nancy’s pond, which shows the aftermath of our most recent  hurricane with the prop holding up the Jacaranda tree behind me.  But you can see that the garden very quickly recovered from the wreckage of the storm.

Photo of plant containers and the backdrop features the firespike or Odontonema, the mainstay of Nancy’s fall garden with its dramatic red blooms.

 You will find urban gardeners all over New Orleans, especially in the Garden District, but my friend, Nancy, is a gardener ‘par excellence’.   We share a passion for gardening, nature and natural history books and, kindly, this past autumn, Nancy loaned me books by Andrea Wulf, Diane Ackerman, Nancy Ross Hugo and others who write prose about the natural world.

Oh those beautiful nasturtiums!

As fellow nature lovers, you will love Andrea Wulf’s fascinating story, ‘Founding Gardens’.  During this contentious election season and looming fiscal crisis, I found interesting parallels reading about our Founding Fathers and the political process today.  More to the point, I learned that the one shared passion of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison was – you would never have guessed – horticulture, as well as gardening in its largest sense.  Horticulture meant independence and self-sufficiency in the new colonies.  And the garden came from the heart.  All the Founding Fathers deeply loved the sublime majesty of the American forest, and they also deeply embraced nature in general; Washington actually created his garden with all native American plants.  Wulf even speculated that, one day in Philadelphia, the squabbling delegates to the Constitutional Congress may have broken their deadlock, and found a kind of shared destiny, while some of them meandered together around the famous garden of John Bartram!  Perhaps today our current elected representatives should all get together and chat, while wandering the wonderful woodlands and gardens of our Founding Fathers.  Perhaps a sense of shared destiny will actually inspire them to get something done…

In this day and age, it sure is a lot easier to correspond, though it's still hard to smuggle back the seeds to Costa Rica...

Photo of Longue Vue 

Nancy and I spent a fun afternoon recently wandering around the Longue Vue Gardens together.  A lovely place to meander for an hour or so.  However, we prefer woodland gardens, and you can find that effect in many gardens today – where nature simply comes right up to the house.  New Orleans has many lovely public gardens – City Park, Audubon Park and many others, but I prefer sitting in Nancy’s garden best of all.  Her garden just continuously changes over the year as different plants predominate, reflecting the seasons circling around in New Orleans.

 Oh the scent of Nancy's yellow rose!

Nancy volunteers for the Urban Gardening Program at the Samuel Green Charter School located in an area of low income families.  Alice Waters inspired the ‘edible schoolyard program’ and you can now find ‘edible schoolyards’ all over the country.  I went with Nancy one day to help the kids work in their garden – to share perhaps some planting tidbits and give encouraging words along the way.  But on the day we volunteered, the whole school was all geared up for an ‘Iron Chef’ competition!  The 7^th grade kids had teamed up with several local chefs for a schoolyard cooking competition, most of which was recorded by local newscasters, as well as by lots of parents and other people with cameras.  Sadly, however, I had not brought my camera, so there are no pictures in this blog.  The secret ingredient for this schoolyard ‘Iron Chef’ competition was – apple!  Wow!  These kids were not only learning how to grow things, but also how to design recipes, measure ingredients, and then prepare their fruits and vegetables.   That’s analytical and creative abilities all together!

kitchen garden at Longue Vue

I was thinking what a great idea it was that the school could use their own freshly grown produce to cook in the cafeteria.  However, Nancy informed me that, lamentably, the school’s contract with their food supplier stipulated that they could not use the school-grown vegetables, unless they could prove that they could get all their supplies from the garden.  This was, of course, not possible, so they were not allowed to use their garden edibles, and had to buy everything from the food supplier.  I asked, “But can’t they sneak those beautiful Brussels sprouts into the kitchen to give to the cooks – or help them cook that day?”  Nancy didn’t think so – our agricultural industry regulations are at work here.  I have no doubt though, that at least some of the garden produce goes home with the kids, so they can cook and enjoy it in their own kitchens…

The Big Easy Urban Jungle is filled with the sounds of music.  Unlike the forest symphony, most sounds in New Orleans are created by humans.  All sorts of music fills the air - jazz, rock, blues, classical and naturally, opera!  This is a photo of mezzo soprano Deborah Domanski with her husband, Michael Gelb, posing back-stage after the Sunday performance of Rossini's Barber of Seville.  Deborah performed Rosina - the klutzy, funny, lovely, lyrical ward of Doctor Bartelo, performed by Thomas Hammons.

Every day in New Orleans is another parade, another second-line, another chance for the marching bands to show us how it's done.  Today is Thanksgiving day.  You will find parades across the country but you can't beat the Bayou Classic in the Big Easy.   Marching bands and floats brought everybody out in the streets.   Just awesome.  We went back inside with dozens of beads tossed to us from the floats. 

A couple of weeks ago, we went out in the street to see the Bicentennial Military & Veterans Parade marching through the streets of New Orleans.  We saw military trucks, tanks and scores of servicemen, past and present, marching in perfect time to the order, “Left, right…”  And they were so coordinated.  Also the bands came marching by, playing army tunes, marine tunes or tunes of whichever other branch of the military to which they belonged.  The ROTC and Cadets also marched by – not nearly so perfectly in unison but having lots of fun.  Our apartment is located toward the end of the march, so perhaps that explains why one guy from the National Guard suddenly dashed out of formation and ran into the bar next door.  He soon came back out with a plastic cup brimming to the top with beer, and all his team mates gave him a big cheer.  However, apart from that funny incident, all the other groups marched with fine discipline.  Those parading past in trucks did not throw any beads, sorry to say.  But, even without that incentive, the crowds came out and shouted over and over again, “Thank you! Thank you!”