Rooted in Something Deeper
Running a restaurant can be a game of cold numbers. The St. John Restaurant in downtown St. Martinville goes through two thousand pounds of cucumbers every year and three thousand pounds of tomatoes. Thousands of heads of lettuce and tens of thousands of peppers.
Celebrating Evangeline
The St. Martinville Garden Club will be celebrating the recently renovated Evangeline Oak Park with events scheduled throughout the month of April. For the first time in the city’s history, over the course of five events, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline: A Tale of Acadie will be read in its entirety, beginning and ending under the legendary oak.
Magical Yellowtops
The official state wildflower of Louisiana is the Louisiana iris, and who, having seen her purple petals in person, would deny her her celebrity status? Some even trace the roots of the fleur-de-lis symbol, so central to Louisiana’s mythology, back to a wild iris, fittingly, and not a lily. And the spectrum of her petals befits her grandeur, too: purple, purple-red, purple-black, purple-blue. Horticulturists create hybrids in her honor. But this is a story about another Louisiana wildflower. She isn’t an official anything. In fact, she’s considered a lowly weed.
“The Other Oak” in Evangeline Oak Park
Some call her Evangeline’s daughter, or Evangeline’s sister, but she has no official name. That is about to change.
Evangeline’s Daughters
Evangeline was unwell. You could see it in Her lackluster crown, leaf-bald in places, and in the meager crop of acorns She begrudgingly sprouted. A creeping fig vine, starting out innocently enough as an ornamental ground cover in the 1980s, had escaped its intended location and had managed to scale the trunk of the legendary oak, growing tighter, more leafy and more woody every year, tighter even to the point of cutting into Evangeline’s bark.