Hurricane Katrina’s arrival on Aug. 29, 2005, was a devastating blow to the southern coast of the United States. Mary Olson, a Douglas County Master Gardener, had been there just three days earlier, visiting her daughter. On that fateful day, she kept close watch on news organization broadcasts about the destruction taking place at that lush, scenic city she had just visited.Katrina not only affected the residents of New Orleans, it caused overwhelming flooding and damage to the city’s plants and gardens. As much as 3 feet of water inundated the New Orleans Botanical Gardens and sat there for two weeks, killing the majority of the park’s 2,000 varieties of plants. Even flora raised in containers couldn’t survive the lack of electricity, and so the orchids, staghorn ferns and bromeliads perished as well.

The garden, originally known as the City Park Rose Garden, opened in 1936 as New Orleans’ first public classical garden. It remains one of the few examples of the Art Deco Period’s aesthetic influence on a public garden. The New Orleans Botanical Gardens also boast the nation’s largest stand of mature live oak trees.

Olson was worried about those live oaks and wanted to put her skills as a gardener to work for the people of New Orleans.

Helping hands

Eight months after Katrina struck, Olson had to leave her house for a week while it underwent renovations, so she called the Louisiana State University Agency and offered her assistance.

“They said they needed major amounts of help,” she says. “In some small measure, I think everyone would like to go down there and do something. I was in a place and time with skills that could be put to good use.”

Despite the time that had passed, Olson and fellow Master Gardener Margarete Johnson could hardly believe how much work remained.

“It was really a surreal experience, to get on an airplane and three hours later land in a place that was like some third world country,” Olson says. “There were no street signs, no streetlights. We saw many houses that still had the marks on them stating the number of dead.”

Getting to work

When Olson and Johnson reported for duty at the Botanical Gardens, all of the plant life was dead or dying. The LSU Extension Agency had tested the soil and found salt, which kills plants. The only way to rid soil of salt is to flush it away, but they did not have the water resources to do that, so new soil was brought in instead.

“For two straight weeks we propagated plants,” Olson says. “We didn’t need much direction; they would basically bring us cuttings and say, ‘Go do your thing.’”

She says the greenhouse had been washed away, but a group of students from the University of Pennsylvania came in and cleaned up the glass.

“Gardeners who heard of the need had sent in bare-root specimens of roses from all over the world,” Olson says. “It was really something to see volunteers appear and work, then just melt away. …There were people from as far as Alaska who had come to help.”

Johnson recalls that the Corps of Engineers stepped up to help, too, using old drawings of the garden to help replicate what was lost.

“They could have just sat there and played cards or done nothing, but everyone just wanted to lend a hand,” she says.

Great spirit

Volunteers readied the garden for the annual plant sale and botanical garden open house, even though it was smaller than most years and some of the Master Gardeners were homeless.

“The most amazing thing about the entire experience was these women and men who came to volunteer,” Olson says. “They had no homes to go home to, no showers to enjoy and yet here they were, under the canopy of trees working. They were laughing and joking, and their spirit was infectious. The botanical gardens made them feel good; they had no yards of their own, just a trailer plopped where a yard used to be.

“What we contributed was so minuscule,” she adds. “I think we got more out of it than we put into it.”

originally appeared in the Lawrence Journal World

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