Inside New Orleans City Park, behind a graceful entrance on Victory Avenue, the New Orleans Botanical Garden spreads across 10 acres of themed gardens – a green, quiet counterpoint to the city’s music and parades, and one of its prettiest places to spend a slow morning.
The garden grew out of the 1930s as a Works Progress Administration project, and its Art Deco bones still show in the historic gates, pavilions and sculpture. It is the city’s largest collection of its kind: more than 2,000 kinds of plants from around the world arranged in themed areas, from roses and camellias to a tropical conservatory and a Japanese garden. Woven through the paths are sculptures by Enrique Alferez, the Mexican-born artist whose work defines the garden’s character, including the beloved Alferez in the Garden displays.
Families love the Train Garden, where model trains wind through a miniature New Orleans built from plants and natural materials, and the seasonal plantings that change the garden’s colors through the year. Because it sits inside City Park, a botanical morning pairs easily with the museum, the sculpture garden and beignets nearby. It is New Orleans at its gentlest – shade, flowers and time to wander.
Photo: Wikimedia Commons
