A House Built for the Garden

Longue Vue's Gardens

The art of maintaining Ellen Biddle Shipman's remarkable landscaping

Story by Kristy Christiansen • Photos by Paul Christiansen

When my husband dug up every blade of grass in our front yard in Uptown New Orleans and planted a veritable jungle, quite a few eyebrows shot up in the neighborhood. His original goal was to avoid ever having to buy a lawnmower, but over the next ten years, his garden became a focal point of the area.

Today, trendsetters in the gardening space have a name for this approach: “rewilding.” The shift away from carefully-manicured lawns and hedges places an emphasis on returning the land to its natural state using plants indigenous to the region. But it’s not an entirely new concept.

Between 1914 and 1946, Ellen Biddle Shipman, famed “dean of women landscape architects,” created over 600 gardens, making her mark on properties belonging to Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the Rockefellers, and the DuPonts. Her landscapes are described as a series of “outdoor rooms,” and she often employed a mixture of formal gardens and “wild” gardens, one leading delightfully into the other. Today, only one intact Shipman design remains open to the public—Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans.

Clusters of butterweed from Longue Vue’s Wild Garden.

Paul Christiansen

Listed on the National Register of Historic Places and designated a National Historic Landmark, Longue Vue was once the grand property of New Orleans businessman Edgar Bloom Stern and Edith Rosenwald Stern, daughter of Chicago philanthropist Julius Rosenwald. Married a hundred and two years ago, the couple built their impressive home on eight acres of land and then set out to transform the landscape around them.

In 1935, they hired Shipman as their landscape architect. Shipman’s meticulous plans included more than a dozen distinct garden spaces, including an “Oak Allée,” “Pan Garden,” “Portico Garden,” “Walled Garden,” overlook, and goldfish pond. One acre of land was set aside for the “Wild Garden”—which Shipman designed, and for which Louisiana naturalist Caroline Dorman served as a native plant consultant.

The Sterns soon realized their home, which lacked commanding views of the exterior landscape, no longer fit the needs of their expanding garden, so they sold it, had it lifted on logs and carted down the street by mules. Architects William and Geoffrey Platt, sons of Shipman’s mentor Charles Platt, were brought in to create a more integrated indoor-outdoor design for the current Longue Vue mansion, which was built between 1939 and 1942. Shipman was employed to design the home’s interior.

“The new house is smaller, and it was built after the gardens,” empha sized Amy Graham, Longue Vue’s Director of Gardens, who pointed out that every window in the home is placed to provide a striking view, with interior and exterior spaces flowing together effortlessly. “It’s really a testament to how important their garden is.”

The Sterns were civic leaders and philanthropists in the New Orleans area, advocating for voting rights and donating time and money to schools, art museums, and hospitals. Nearly a decade after Edgar’s passing, in 1968 Edith opened Longue Vue’s gardens to the public, and the house became a museum a few months before her passing in 1980.

With a few exceptions, such as the children’s Discovery Garden added in 1998, the property looks much the same today as it did when the Sterns resided here. “Part of my job is to keep the gardens original to the plans. I keep the historic integrity intact,” said Graham, who noted that the live oak trees here date to 1938.

Louisiana Irises usher visitors down a path through Longue Vue’s Wild Garden.

Paul Christiansen

The Wild Garden begins near a Shipman-designed pigeonnier overlooking a goldfish pond with a trickling waterfall. Live oaks dot the skyline, scattering shade across bright green clumps of irises preparing for their spring flower show. Seventy shrubs and woody vines and countless wildflowers intermingle in this oasis, which is almost completely planted with flora native to the Southeast. The camellias stand out as the exception, but many are original to the garden.

Three walks carve pathways deep into the heart of the natural haven. One features a splendid row of winter-blooming camellias, another boasts 3,500 irises that flower in March and April, and a third wildflower path paints a canvas of color in the spring and summer with azaleas and birch trees as focal points, mixed among an array of fairytale-named plants like devilwood, giant turk’s cap, hairy pepperbush, and weeping yaupon.

“This is a great example of what you can create in your home garden,” said Graham. “New Orleans has unique challenges—extreme heat and humidity, excessive rainfall. This garden gives you an idea of what will work here.” She then outlined the steps to creating a wild garden at home: “First you need to take up the lawn. Then you need to decide if you want to plant plants or seeds. And then, join the Native Plant Initiative.”

The Native Plant Initiative of Greater New Orleans is a nonprofit dedicated to expanding public awareness, and boosting availability, of native plants. Their case for using native plants is three-fold: insects depend on them as food sources; the plants provide greater diversity in our gardens; and they perform better here, as they are adapted to our weather extremes. The group’s volunteers offer native plantings at local libraries, City Park, and the University of New Orleans; and frequently host native plant giveaways across the city.

Native plant gardener Chris Booth works almost exclusively in Longue Vue’s Wild Garden. Originally from Hawaii, Booth holds an especial appreciation of a region’s native plants. “These plants are meant to be here,” he said. “I see it as the plants’ destiny to retake their land that humans disturbed. Renaturalism is a good model, especially in cities. I would love to see more people rewilding.”

Booth points out that in recent years there is a big push to replenish native plants and put them back into rotation. “These plants know how to exist here, and the space here is creating an environment for wildlife.” Beckoning us down the path, he stopped in front of a short plant topped with clusters of yellow flowers. “Take butterweed. It grows on the roadside and attracts native bees you rarely see. The flowers aren’t for us. They’re here for the bugs and the birds. It’s like an infrastructure for animal life.”

Longue Vue’s director of gardens Amy Graham works to preserve the historic integrity of Longue Vue’s gardens, which were designed by Ellen Biddle Shipman—one of the most iconic landscape architects of the twentieth century.

Paul Christiansen

One of Graham and Booth’s favorite spots at Longue Vue is the wildflower garden Graham planted along the home’s eastern edge. “One acre of native plants wasn’t enough for us,” laughed Graham. “This area was just lawn until five years ago, but it has the best sun and a flat surface. Once it comes to life, it will just take off. And it’s self-seeding, so it will replenish itself in a very natural way.”

A temporary installation, the pollinator garden came from a seed mix purchased from the Native American Seed Co. and provides an abundance of food for bees and seed for birds. As we admired the space, a giant possum lumbered out from under a bush and continued on his way, content in the natural habitat around him.

Although Graham removed a lawn to create the pollinator garden, she points out that grass is not all bad. Native grasses can create great environments, as well. “Once called weeds, it’s now called a mosaic lawn. It’s very pretty to allow whatever grows to grow. We use all-natural gardening here, no herbicides or leaf blowers, so there is a lot of mixture in our grass.

“I believe public expectations for public gardens are changing,” Graham continued. “It used to be ‘pristine’ and now ‘sustainable’ is the new term. Young people are dictating the change. They walk in and see leaves on the ground and don’t say they need to be picked up.”

As Graham points out, change is hard, but it’s happening. As more people embrace the natural environment and distributors begin promoting native plants, yards will begin to transform. In the future, we might see wild gardens emerging, tiny wildlife habitats all their own, on every block. longuevue.com

Paul Christiansen