LiveGreenNOW

By Traci L. Claussen

In a previous post I mentioned that one advantage of living inside a concrete jungle is being able to take a “quick” green escape at any one of our public gardens. In New Orleans, that includes the Botanical Garden inside the 12+ acres that encompass City Park, a garden that not only knows how to age gracefully, but has the strength and deepness of root to thrive again, even after storm floods attempted to wash it away. If your inner wanderlust is screaming, then why not take an ecotrip through our Botanical Garden?

Rooted in the Great Depression, the New Orleans Botanical Garden was a project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Originally known as the City Park Rose Garden, the garden opened in 1936 as New Orleans’ first public classical garden. It remains as one of the few examples of public garden design from the WPA and Art Deco Period, and is today, a showcase of three notable talents: New Orleans Architect Richard Koch, Landscape architect William Wiedorn, and Artist Enrique Alferez.

After being reborn as the New Orleans Botanical Garden in the early 1980s the garden’s collections contained over 2,000 varieties of plants from all over the world set among the nation’s largest stand of mature live oaks. Since its rebirth, the New Orleans Botanical Garden has strived to be the center of horticultural excellence for the Gulf South.

Tucked away inside City Park, the Botanical Garden has a host of environments to satisfy every eco-traveler, from the newly constructed, work-in-progress rain collection garden inside the Green Pavilion, to the Japanese Garden Society’s Zen-scape, the Rainforest and Living Fossils of the Conservatory, the Butterfly Garden, or even the New Orleans Historic Train Garden. Get away from your habitual grind and take a mini-eco-cation with me as New Orleans Botanical Garden Director Paul Soniat gives us the dirt:

The Green Pavilion, a vertical garden design partnership of buildingstudio architects and Tulane City Center’s School of Architecture urban research program Coleman Coker, David Dieckhoff, Seth Welty, Tom Holloman, and Emily Taylor, is a working example that shows local residents how to stylishly recycle gray water (outflow from showers, washers, sinks) from their homes for reuse. The rain collector demonstrates the idea of creating a garden feature to collect rainwater inside, use plants to cleanse it and a wetland to store it, all so that it could be recycled into irrigating the garden. A great example of sustainability, the rain collector was created using borate treated lumber (toxic to insects, safe for humans, pets and environment), conduit trays and cables donated by Shell Oil (putting a new face on oil cable), perforated aluminum and recycled steel. Even the cement used for the walls of the trough incorporates fly-ash, an industrial waste product. Allow the sustainable ideas to flow into your collective heads and sprout an urban vertical garden around your home.

In a Japanese Garden
By Lafcadio Hearn

No effort to create an impossible or pure ideal landscape is made in the Japanese Garden. Its artistic purpose is to copy faithfully the veritable landscape, and to convey the real impression that a real landscape communicates. It is therefore at once a picture and a poem; perhaps even more a poem than a picture. For as nature’s scenery, in its varying aspects, affects us with sensations of joy or solemnity, of grimness or of sweetness, of force or of peace, so must the true reflection of it in the labor of the landscape gardener create not merely an impression of beauty, but a mood in the soul.”

The Japanese Garden Society of New Orleans, under the direction of Dr. Jack Perry Strong, created both a picture and a poem within their garden that got my soul singing. Take a moment to meditate inside this poetic garden either before or after exploring alongside the Monarchs in the Butterfly Garden.

New Orleans Botanical Garden is more than a great location for your wedding or reception.  It is a well-earned break from the corporate rat-race, or an environmental-cation break whenever you need it.

Now playing in New Orleans Botanical Garden @ City Park:

Thursdays at Twilight in the Pavilion of the Two Sisters (through October 8th) ~ Music begins at 6p, with Mint Juleps, wine, beer, soft drinks and food available for purchase.  Admission $6 adults, $2 kids (age 5-12) for complete series, click here.

Is your green thumb in need of a little color?  Why not volunteer at the Botanical Garden every Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday from 8:30a-12n?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 24th, 2010 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Eco Travel, Green House, Live Green Picks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.