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gardening: All things green.

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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Adolph Bynum. Click image to expand.

Adolph Bynum's garden has the best features of a typical French Quarter garden, though it's not quite in the Quarter. His plantings demonstrate the kind of Eden you can create in a city that is more like the northern edge of the Caribbean than the southern edge of the United States.

The water was a couple of feet deep on his street—St. Claude, in Treme—and about 1 foot deep in his garden. The advancing flood stopped a few blocks away, just short of the French Quarter, as if it were sparing the city's income-producing places.

Treme is the oldest African-American neighborhood in the country, founded, Bynum says proudly, by "free men of color." He built his own house on St. Claude, a perfect, though larger, replica of a Creole cottage, in 2002.

Bynum's garden is a courtyard behind several 1840s Creole cottages he restored in order to rent. He didn't so much mind the destruction of two large hollies; the heartbreaker was the loss of a 150-year-old fig tree. He has stuck a clay mask on the remaining stump. The water was shallower and receded more quickly in Treme than in Broadmoor. All the small plants turned brown but recovered. Even azaleas, which we think of as finicky, pulled through.

The city is a crescent lying between two bodies of water, the lake and the Gulf, putting it at risk but also giving it, in the calm times, distinctively moist, soft air. The humidity and warmth favor the kinds of plants in Bynum's courtyard: monster philodendron, elephant ears, striped green and yellow gingers, banana trees, jasmine, and fan palms. Those tropical plants' leaves might get ripped by the wind, but they recover.

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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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