All the Dirt on Gardening

Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans, LA (www.longuevue.com), now a museum and public garden, was designed in 1935-42 as the home for Edgar Bloom Stern and Edith Rosenwald Sulzberger Stern. Both were important philanthropists: Edgar was a cotton broker, and banker and Edith was heiress to the Sears-Roebuck fortune.   The gardens at Longue Vue, ten minutes from Bourbon ST and downtown New Orleans, provide visitors with an opportunity to tour 14 separate garden rooms including an Azalea Walk, Yellow Garden, Canal Garden, Walled Garden, Spanish Court, Wild Garden and Discovery Garden. Two women were integral to the beauty of the estate you can see at Longue Vue: The 8-acre landscape and the 22,000 square-foot residential interior were designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman and the landscape plan was implemented with the help of Caroline Dormon. Shipman (1869-1950), who designed 600 gardens, was known for creating pictures as an artist would, but using plants instead of ...

We visited and toured the house and gardens at Longue Vue on our trip last week to New Orleans.  I'll be writing more about that later, but today I want to show you the cool Children's Discovery Garden they built in 1998 complete with a butterfly egg/chrysalis/hatching structure, bamboo tunnel, worm dig, herb maze, compost pile, and sundial. This perfect height and size butterfly raising container is where the extra butterfly and moth eggs from the New Orleans Zoo get to grow up and be released for the wonder and education of children. Here's a recently hatched moth. Robin Moth - (Cecropia Moth) - Hyalophora cecropia I had to look twice to see that these are cute little caterpillar spades that the children use when planting seeds and seedlings. Adorable. Everything in the Lucy C. Roussel  Discovery Garden is edible - herbs, flowers, veggies. The paths are wide enough to allow for groups of children and there is whimsical artwork scattered throughout. ...