How one woman’s gardening helped rebuild New Orleans
Loading player...
New York — New Orleans’ lower ninth ward bears plenty of scars of Hurricane Katrina that devastated the city 15 years ago — overgrown vacant lots, broken foundations where houses once stood and empty streets where people once lived.
Then there’s the gardens of Jeanette Bell, plots of life she has built to teach people to grow their own food from the ruins.
“Once you start growing, you immediately recognise the difference, instantly, in your food and in your life,” said Bell, founder of the Garden on Mars urban garden project. “It changes the way you view people and food and living. It changes your whole life.”
Bell has five gardens in the lower ninth, the poorest and worst hit of New Orleans’ 17 wards when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and 80% of the city was flooded.
In the low-lying quarter in the eastern part of the Louisiana city, a levee holding back the Industrial Canal gave way and a wall of water inundated its homes. Residents were marooned for days on rooftops or trapped in their attics.
Bell said she was luckier than many of her neighbours after Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29. Her home in the Central City neighbourhood was damaged but liveable, and when she returned after a five-week evacuation, her roses were in bloom.
“So I made bouquets,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “So much was dead in the city, the part of the city that flooded, the landscape died.”
She snipped thousands of roses and created bouquets for strangers driving by and delivered them to first responders staying at Red Cross shelters.
‘Teach people’
After the storm, Bell said she found herself lost one day driving through the ward, where houses, shops, trees and street signs had washed away.
“I thought, this is ridiculous. You’ve got all of this land that’s not being used,” she said. “Instead of waiting for the supermarket, which is not going to come until you get the customer base to support it, I thought the thing to do was teach people how to grow some of their own food on the land they have.”
Her gardens were about to be used in a project with Tulane University as outdoor classrooms for teaching urban agriculture but the coronavirus pandemic has put those plans on hold, leaving Bell to tend to the plots ...
Then there’s the gardens of Jeanette Bell, plots of life she has built to teach people to grow their own food from the ruins.
“Once you start growing, you immediately recognise the difference, instantly, in your food and in your life,” said Bell, founder of the Garden on Mars urban garden project. “It changes the way you view people and food and living. It changes your whole life.”
Bell has five gardens in the lower ninth, the poorest and worst hit of New Orleans’ 17 wards when the levees broke during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and 80% of the city was flooded.
In the low-lying quarter in the eastern part of the Louisiana city, a levee holding back the Industrial Canal gave way and a wall of water inundated its homes. Residents were marooned for days on rooftops or trapped in their attics.
Bell said she was luckier than many of her neighbours after Katrina made landfall in New Orleans on August 29. Her home in the Central City neighbourhood was damaged but liveable, and when she returned after a five-week evacuation, her roses were in bloom.
“So I made bouquets,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “So much was dead in the city, the part of the city that flooded, the landscape died.”
She snipped thousands of roses and created bouquets for strangers driving by and delivered them to first responders staying at Red Cross shelters.
‘Teach people’
After the storm, Bell said she found herself lost one day driving through the ward, where houses, shops, trees and street signs had washed away.
“I thought, this is ridiculous. You’ve got all of this land that’s not being used,” she said. “Instead of waiting for the supermarket, which is not going to come until you get the customer base to support it, I thought the thing to do was teach people how to grow some of their own food on the land they have.”
Her gardens were about to be used in a project with Tulane University as outdoor classrooms for teaching urban agriculture but the coronavirus pandemic has put those plans on hold, leaving Bell to tend to the plots ...
