New Orleans gardens.(Current and coming)

Much has been written about New Orleans and the fine and decorative arts created in this, the most French of all American cities. By contrast, the history of landscape architecture there is less well known. The Historic New Orleans Collection has organized an exhibition entitled In Search of Yesterday's Gardens: Landscapes of 19th-Century New Orleans, which comprises more than one hundred maps, books, paintings, documents, garden plans, garden ornaments, and objects decorated with local flora to survey this aspect of life in one of the largest cities in the South.

As New Orleans was first being settled in the early eighteenth century, the French found strange and exotic plants, and farmers were forced to rely heavily on the Indians to teach them how to plant and harvest them. Many experiments in cash crop farming were unsuccessful, including indigo, tobacco, and the mulberry trees necessary for silkworm culture. The few ornamental gardens in these early years that are known to historians through documents were generally based on French seventeenth and eighteenth-century garden designs, the most prominent feature being the parterre.

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German settlers upriver from New Orleans, living on what was known as the Cotes des Allemands (German coast), grew enough fruits and vegetables to supply residents of the city, and by the mideighteenth century they were able to export a surplus to the West Indies. By the end of the eighteenth century farmers had discovered that conditions were perfect for raising cotton, sugarcane, and indigo, which were grown on enormous plantations that relied on slaves to work the fields, and they became the cash crops from which many planters derived considerable wealth.

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