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The Gardens That Care ForgotHow New Orleans residents are replanting their roots.

By Constance Casey
Posted Friday, Feb. 1, 2008, at 7:27 AM ET

To volunteer or contribute money to rebuilding New Orleans' gardens, you can find more info here.

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As the house went up and the water went down, church-group volunteers came to help clean debris and rotting vegetation in the yard. Another volunteer, Suzanne Hague from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, provided a plan for a new garden and built Ireland raised beds for her future vegetable plot. Hague's plan includes a channel to collect rainwater, directing it to an area for native cypress trees. Cypresses, unlike magnolias, are trees that evolved to deal with short periods of flooding.

"They'll give good shade in about 15 years," Ireland says. Her patience is high, her irony low.

Ireland sawed off the dead parts of her gigantic wisteria vine, leaving a hulking gray trunk that is sending out new shoots. She points out that Katrina gave her a new peach tree. Someone's discarded pit sprouted and the little tree has shot up about shoulder-high. "The thing that's so great about gardening," Ireland said, "is that everything will come back."

The plant that winter visitors to any New Orleans neighborhood remember and natives most prize is sweet olive, osmanthus fragrans. It's a shrub that grows as high as 20 feet, with tiny white flowers that send out a scent all the more wonderful because you can't quite tell where it's coming from. Sweet olive blooms from late fall to early spring, beginning to wind down around Mardi Gras.

The thought of replanting her sweet olives kept Ireland going through what she calls the "mud, sweat, and tears." The way she sees it, "I'll be smelling sweet olive. I'll be living alone in my house. I'll be getting ready to go out in my garden and do nothing."

Scavo and Walker. Click image to expand.

Linda Ireland is just beginning to replant, but Jerry Scavo devoted himself to making a complex and complete garden in only a year. Things come back, but not without a lot of work. Scavo had to go to the hospital to get a hernia repaired after moving thousands of pounds of granite blocks, bricks, and pavers from his old garden, which was washed away by a wave from Lake Pontchartrain, to his new garden, which had been under 4 feet of water.

All these rocks were moved in the back of his partner Kenny Walker's little PT Cruiser. Scavo and Walker, a couple for 43 years, lived in Lakeview, an affluent neighborhood in a reclaimed swamp. There they had a formal garden with tidy gravel paths and planted squares outlined in boxwood, giving it the look of a miniature Italian villa's landscape. With 11 feet of water in the house and 15 feet in the garden, they decided rebuilding in low land beside a lake was not a good idea.

They moved to a sturdy little 1928 brick house a few blocks north of Broadmoor set, significantly, 10 feet above the street. Over a year, while Walker fixed the plumbing, floors, walls, and electricity, Scavo constructed a new garden good enough to be included on the New Orleans Botanical Gardens' Post-Katrina Recovery Tour.

Scavo, whose family came to New Orleans from Sicily in the 1850s, was a display designer for 32 years at D.H. Holmes & Co., the city's historic (now defunct) department store. Those display skills are evident in his new creation. In a very small space, he has made distinct garden rooms linked by stone paths. Pots and sculpture sit on pedestals, like small altars. Pink camellias and azaleas mix with purple cabbage and asparagus, vines cloak every bit of fence, and several fountains burble.

Momentarily unable to recall the name of one of his hundreds of plants, Scavo says with astounding good humor, "Between the chemo and Katrina, I can't remember anything."

Scavo was in remission from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma when Katrina hit. His remission has ended. As to the mental condition, New Orleanians have coined the term "Katrina syndrome" for irritability, difficulty sleeping, and memory loss.

The name of the vine in question came to him. It's maypop. It's the only plant, he wants me to know, on which the Gulf fritillary butterfly lays its eggs.

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Constance Casey, a former newspaper editor, was a New York City Department of Parks gardener for five years. E-mail gardening questions to .
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