New Orleans Botanical Garden
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The New Orleans Botanical Garden is a botanical garden located in City Park, New Orleans, Louisiana. The garden was severely damaged by the flooding following Hurricane Katrina on August 29, 2005. The garden was under up to three feet of water for as much as two weeks.
The Garden was closed while City Park's reduced staff removed the remains of its collections, cleaned, replanted, and lit the garden to open it for an abbreviated version of City Park's annual Celebration in the Oaks lighting display during the 2005 Christmas season. The replanted Garden reopened to the public in March of 2006.
The garden was established in 1936 as a Works Progress Administration project during the Great Depression. It was at that time a rose garden. In the early 1980s it became a botanical garden, with over 2,000 varieties of plants set within stands of mature live oak trees. The conservatory contains a tropical rainforest collection and a living fossils fern collection with fern displayed alongside their fossils; theme gardens include tropicals, aquatics, ornamental trees and shrubs, perennials, and the New Orleans Historic Train Garden featuring a miniature layout of the city's neighborhoods and its architectural treasures built of plant parts.
The flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (see: Effect of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans) caused serious tree damage and the loss of the vast majority of the garden's collection which have been largely replaced thanks to donors both local and worldwide.
[edit] See also
New Orleans Botanical Garden, City Park homepage 29,59,33n 90,05,57,w
