Botany

Nestled in an office inside the non-public section of Avery Island—famous for its Tabasco Sauce and Jungle Gardens—Garrie Landry takes on a task that is in one way daunting, in another a labor of love.
Landry, a Franklin native who still makes his home here, wanted to make his life’s work the study of fish and birds when he enrolled at the University of Southwestern Louisiana in 1969.
“I certainly didn’t have any clue that I would major in botany,” Landry said, sitting in his office at the island, in his post as botanist in charge for the McIlhenny Company. “At that time you could major in zoology, botany, wildlife management, all sorts of disciplines. I think that was to attract students. Now you just major in biology, and you specialize in those fields.”
Landry said ichthyology or ornithology were his first choices. Even in high school, “Alvin Hebert and I would run the levees, catching fish, and keep them in aquariums, and of course, I had my interest in birds,” he said. “But looking back, I know without a doubt that it was the professors that ended up stimulating the students. And when I took my first botany course, I was just blown away by the professor, and what he did, how much fun this was. The changed happened pretty quickly, because I found myself looking at the ground for plants and no longer looking up in the trees for birds.”
That was in his sophomore year and the course was plant taxonomy, the science that finds, identifies, describes, classifies and names plants. He and Prof. Bill Reese ended up working together until the mentor’s death.
When Landry completed his graduate studies at LSU, Prof. Reese convinced him to return to USL, though he was already employed by the Baton Rouge college. “He made a very tempting offer,” Landry said. “In a way that was perfect, because I was closer to my parents in Franklin.”
He tried to live in Lafayette for a time, but early 1980s were the days of the oil boom. “There was no way I could afford a house in Lafayette back then,” Landry said. “So I ended up moving to Franklin, and the lady two doors down from my mother, Hazel Pontiff, wanted to sell her house. I approached her and said, ‘Why don’t you sell it to me directly, I’ll pay you, I’ll give you so much down and pay you every month.’ She agreed to that, so I bought the house and moved back to Franklin.”
He commuted to Lafayette after that and “never minded it.”
Landry said with the exception of 4½ years at LSU, his entire life after high school was spent on the USL campus. “The most difficult thing for me was deciding to retire,” he said.
He and his wife Lynn were watching a television program that said, “It’s not difficult holding onto things, it’s difficult letting go."
"I had a hard time letting go of UL. I haven’t completely let go," Landry said. "They let me keep an office, and I still teach a couple classes.”
At that time Landry was allowed to botanize on Avery Island. “Most people can’t say that,” Landry said. “It’s a very private place. With the exception of Jungle Gardens and the Tabasco factory, the general public doesn’t get to see it all. I don’t blame (the owners.) That’s how they want it. They want their privacy.”
It came about when he met Ned Simmons, son of Polly McIlhenny Simmons, daughter of Edward Avery “Ned” McIlhenny, in the 1970s.
“He was a biology graduate from Tulane who became CEO of the company. He had an interest in biology. Whenever I would call his secretary up and ask if I could go do some exploring on the island, the answer was always yes. Can I bring a class? Yes. Just check and let them know you are here.”
This went on for so many years, if the company had, for example, the Sierra Club coming to the island for an event, the company would call Landry to describe his work on the island.
“I became known for knowing the plants on the island, just accidentally like that,” he said.
During the 1960s, two of his USL professors had performed a botanical survey of the five islands: Avery, Belle Isle, Jefferson, Cote Blanche and Weeks, all salt domes. A paper was published by John Thieret and Bill Reese, which documented many plant species. Thieret later moved to another university, but Landry and Reese kept on investigating the flora of the islands.
He began bringing classes from LSU to the site. “You can go online right now and look at all the specimens in the LSU herbarium and find collections by me made in 1975 from Jungle Gardens, and many of those plants aren’t there anymore. That’s how much things have changed over the years. To some extent I know the family’s interest was for me to document the plants growing in Jungle Gardens. So, they would know where the rare plants are and could protect them; because, in the past on a few occasions some rare plants had been removed. The average person doesn’t know one rare tree from another.”
During all those years, and on all those visits, Landry said he always thought Avery Island would be a “wonderful place to work. Never once did I ever dream that it would actually happen! I guess it happened at the right time, because I think now I have enough botanical knowledge to do the job, at my own leisure, and it’s a tremendous amount of fun.”
There is an intern program at UL, and there are participants working with Landry at Avery Island.
Landry said non-majors classes were often his favorites at UL.
“I was able to get students in there who coulda cared less about a plant, but when they left, they had a totally different outlook on it,” he said. “Many of them told me that every semester. That’s what made it so much fun. I even had students ask me, ‘Can you really make a living being a botanist? What can you do?’ Many of the students I taught…have gone on to work for wildlife and fisheries, or the environmental field doing wetlands delineating, even though they were not botanist when they were at UL. You don’t need to identify the duck, you need to identify the plant the duck is eating!”
He gets messages from former students on social media asking for help with identifications of plants, and such. “I can’t emphasize that enough to students today, that being able to identify plants, if you’re doing field work, makes you very employable.”
Bill Fontenot, a Lafayette naturalist and columnist, about three years ago asked Landry to join him at Avery Island to look at palm trees. “We spent a day there, and met with Lisa Osborn, the great-granddaughter of Edward McIlhenny. Many years earlier, her father and I had spent a day on the island together. Lisa realized my knowledge of plants on the island and shortly after that she kept asking me if I would consider working for the company. When I finally announced that I was going to retire, she stepped that up big time. So I did, and that’s how it all began, quite by accident, really. I met with Lisa’s brother, Harold Osborn, vice president of the company, and he made me the offer.” “When I first sat down with him and asked, What would you like me to do, he said just come here, do what you want to do.”
That was last summer, and Landry says, “So I try to spend two or three days a week here, and when the weather’s good, I spend more time.
But Landry wanted to make a sincere contribution, and he knew that Jungle Gardens needed a survey of the woody plants. “That’s what people are coming to see anyway,” he said.
He and Dylan Derouen ,a UL student in his senior year in biology, became an intern and the plan was “to walk the gardens completely. Start and one end, walk through the woods, come back, walk again, cover every inch of it, and collect plants, to make a specimen to document everything we found there.”
That’s 175 acres of ground to cover. The entire island is about 2,400 acres.
A special find has been a solitary macadamia nut tree, likely planted by Edward McIlhenny. It is small, about five feet tall and had likely been “whacked” a few times in the past but it looks really good.
“When I showed it to the grounds guy, he said it was the only one on the island,” Landry said. “That just shows you how rare some things are in Jungle Gardens, often very little or no documentation of what and where they were planted within the gardens.”
Jungle Gardens actually began as a nursery that sold plants. Edward McIlhenny specialized in named variety of camellias. Landry heard a story that, “Mcilhenny had his guys planting them out, and he told them, ‘Now don’t throw away the tags on the plants!’ So, they pulled all of the tags off the plants and then brought them to him. He couldn’t identify any of the plants!”
The archive Edward McIlhenny left behind is “daunting. There’s a receipt for every bushel of okra he ever sold, it’s there. That room’s filled with hundreds of file cabinets. Everything that was brought into the US for trials (by his associates) was automatically sent to McIlhenny. First day I was going through the archives, one of the first folders I looked in had a receipt dated 1919 for seeds of a rare tree, purchased from the Yokohama Nursery, Yokohama, Japan! Those trees are still growing in Jungle Gardens. There’s a good chance we may be able to document everything we find in the garden, through the archives.”
His investigations into the plants he locates are often difficult to identify. So the work is much like a botanical detective. At one point, Landry located a plant he believed was common privet, a rather invasive woody shrub. But on closer examination he realized it only looked like privet, but wasn’t. He found more of it. So he used the flowers to place it in the right botanical family, and then found the US expert for that family in Michigan. Landry sent that images of the plant, and later sent specimens. The expert identified it as an Oriental plant called “pauper’s tea” or “Chinese plum.”
That meant it was likely brought in by Edward McIlhenny. Landry waited until spring when it flowered and made tiny fruits.
“Absolutely delicious!” Landry said. “The Orientals have bred them to make bigger fruit. My first thought was that every migrating bird that sees this is going to devour it, there are three seeds inside the fruit, and they’re going to fly away and spread those seeds off the island. Once I looked, it’s everywhere on Avery Island…in the 1960s, Thieret and Reese did not find it outside of the gardens.”
There are some trees growing on the island that can be only found 100 miles north at Chicot State park, due to a similar terrain. By their nature, the salt domes such as Avery Island are vastly different than the surrounding terrain, complete with hills, deep ravines, washouts and sinkholes.
“You find some of the plants from Chicot here, but not all of them,” Landry said. “Reese said he felt that the absence of some of those plants was simply due to the lack of time for them to get here.”
Avery Island is considered the premiere place to see cultivated bamboos. The American Bamboo Society visits the island for their annual meeting every spring.
Though he’s been coming to this place since 1973, Landry’s enthusiasm not only for his work but for the unique environment and plant life that is Avery Island and Jungle Gardens, remains strong.
On a trip across the island to show off various species Landry has discovered, he says, “I tell everybody, and this has been very true, every time I come out, I find something new—every single time. I keep telling myself I’m going to run out of discoveries, but I haven’t yet.”