HUNTING FOR HYDRILLA

After spending several days on house repairs and yard maintenance during resettlement in New Iberia, the urge for a change of scenery overcame us, and my botanist friend Vickie decided to drag me along on a search for a plant that grows in nearby St. Martin Parish. She has included a write-up about this plant in her book WHY WATER PLANTS DON'T DROWN, which Susan Elliott of Pinyon Publishing is now illustrating. After lunch, we boarded the Honda and set out for Lake Martin where she had collected specimens of this plant during her career as a professor of botany at the University of Louisiana in Lafayette. I’ve written about Lake Martin in other blogs, but the subject of hydrilla plants has never come up.

The drive through the lowlands in St. Martin Parish in the October sunshine was pleasant, and when we arrived at the lake, we found several trucks parked near the boat landing where fishermen, truant from work, had put in their aluminum Joe boats and pirogues earlier in the day. One returning fisherman, reloading his boat in the 86 degree weather waved me over to see his catch of eight small bass, big enough for a mess, but not large enough to brag about. “I’m staying up here on the dock,” I told him, “because I know how many ‘gators populate this lake.”

“You’re right,” he answered, casting an eye at Vickie standing too close to the edge of the lake, twisting a plant around a stick. “I just ran over one a few minutes ago.”

“It’s a wonder it didn’t turn your boat over,” I said, and he shook his head.

“Lucky, I guess,” he answered. He looked quizzically at me standing there on the dock with the sun turning my white hair even whiter, dressed in pedal pushers and a t-shirt, and asked, “You from around here? “ The question was more like “What are you doing out here?” but I wasn’t offended. I did look out of place.

“For about 45 years,” I told him. He looked relieved that I wasn’t a “come here,” and showed me how his trailer tires had become entangled in “some kind of seaweed” as he pulled it out of the water and onto the boat ramp. At the time I didn’t know that it was hydrilla, the plant for which Vickie had been searching.

Hydrilla is an aggressive water weed that invades water systems and drives away all native and introduced aquatic plants. It survives under lower light conditions than any other species and grows beneath other plants, making it able to live at greater depths. Because it can use low light, it starts photosynthesizing earlier in the day than other plants and captures most of the carbon dioxide that enters the water during the night. The plant is 93-95% water so it can make large volumes of biomass using very few resources. In the summer, it grows rapidly, doubling its biomass. Then it branches as it approaches the water surface and fills the water column up to 20 feet deep, shading out other plants. In California, hydrilla infested an irrigation canal so densely that the water backed up over the banks and ran down a hillside. Hydrilla mats can damage dams and power plants, and interferes with boating and fishing. It can also decrease fishing stocks. In the case of the fisherman to whom I talked, his truck tires spun on the water plants washed up on the boat ramp. Only with the help of another fisherman did he get his boat out.

Among the sights I saw: a mosquito as large as a small dragonfly that landed on the rearview mirror of the Honda; a yellow/gold willow tree glistening in the sunlight, a grove of lotus, and muddy water surfaces covered with duckweed and mats of large yellow flowers called burr marigolds.

As we followed the dusty road to the end of the lake, we saw a long Joe boat filled with eight people who had been cruising on a swamp tour – they’d probably been looking for ‘gators, one of which Vickie spied (and I urged her on) as we sped away with a plastic bag filled with hydrilla specimens.

We got lost on the way home. As a school bus passed, we saw “St. Martin Parish” painted on its yellow side. “Hay la bas,” I hollered, “we’re near St. Martinville. “ And suddenly we emerged in St. Martinville, no thanks to the old Louisiana map I had unearthed that had a hole smack center in the area we were traveling. That’s the way we usually travel – lost – but we find serendipity along the way.

And the hydrilla? It was still green and perky when we reached home; however, I am advising Vickie not to throw it in the coulee behind our house or the drainage ditch will be overcome by this plant, which looks like an ominous caterpillar that lured us outdoors today. Right now, it‘s drifting in a small white cereal bowl in the kitchen. Did I say that it captures most of the carbon dioxide during the night? And what about our oxygen?

BACK IN ”THE BERRY”

As we drove along Main Street for the first time after returning to New Iberia, and I saw the columns of The Shadows on the Teche, a National Trust antebellum mansion, my spirits lifted. Back in the 80’s, my good friend Morris Raphael wrote a biography of Weeks Hall, the man who restored this antebellum mansion and left it to the National Trust so that it would become the town’s principal treasure.

During the 80’s, I reviewed Morris’s book in an issue of “Louisiana History,” and the morning after viewing The Shadows again, I began to read the review about WEEKS HALL; THE MASTER OF THE SHADOWS. I had forgotten that Morris began studying the life of Weeks Hall as a pastime, and the pastime soon became a full-blown passion that resulted in a biography about one of Louisiana’s most colorful characters. Hall spent a lifetime restoring The Shadows-on-the Teche, often living on meager means so that the old mansion would not “fall on hard times.”

To capture the essence of Weeks Hall, Morris interviewed many of Hall’s relatives and friends, including nonagenarian Mrs. Anna Schwing who died before the book was published in 1981. Morris claimed that if he had waited a few months longer to interview people who knew Hall, many of the anecdotes in WEEKS HALL would have been lost, and the book would have failed to be authentic.

WEEKS HALL contains rare photographs of Weeks Hall, his paintings, scenes of The Shadows’ gardens and the old home, as well as family portraits. Morris captures the spirit of a man who “earned for himself the right the right to be called ‘The Master of the Shadows’”. Although many tales still circulate about Hall’s outrageous behavior as a prankster, Morris chose to include only the anecdotes that he could corroborate in the biography.

The white-columned brick plantation home called The Shadows was built between 1831-1834 by David Weeks who had made a fortune in cotton, indigo, and sugar. The Shadows was one of three brick structures built in Classical Revival style with eight columns on the front (an imposing structure when viewed from the street, but it is a narrow home, much smaller than tourists anticipate). Before the home was completed, David Weeks went on a sea voyage to New Haven, Connecticut seeking a physician for an unidentified disease and died while in Connecticut, never having lived in The Shadows. However, his wife, Mary, and her family enjoyed living there until the “late great unpleasantness,” the Civil War, occurred and Mary Weeks died, sequestered in a room on the top story of the old home.

Weeks Hall and his Aunt Pattee, descendants of David Weeks, inherited The Shadows in 1918 and when Aunt Pattee died, Hall became its sole owner. After living abroad for a few years, Hall returned to New Iberia in 1922 and found the old mansion in deplorable condition. Hall was an alcoholic, an eccentric, and a prankster, but he was adamant about the preservation of his mansion. Morris published the remarks Hall made about his restoration efforts in THE MASTER OF THE SHADOWS: “I have lived on this place, attending to it and building it. Nothing in life has meant, or will mean, more to me than this garden on a summer morning before sunrise. At all hours, no place is more tranquil nor more ageless. Its inherent charm to me has been in its placid seclusion from a changing world, and in that will be its value to others. This quality must be preserved…”

THE MASTER OF THE SHADOWS by Morris Raphael remains in print and is a valuable historical document about New Iberia’s most famous property. Several years ago I wrote a novel about Hall entitled SILENCE NEVER BETRAYS, which will probably never see the light of day, but I had fun writing it, and Morris’s book provided a lot of ideas for the fiction piece.

By the way, Morris is the author of at least 13 books and is presently working on a book about Civil War battles and anecdotes about Teche country which should be available in 2011.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

Because I wanted to record a vivid picture of Tennessee that I could take with me when I returned to Louisiana this month, we ventured over to Nashville to see the famous Cheekwood Gardens, 55 acres of lovely gardens and an art museum. The estate was built by the Cheeks, who established their fortune through Maxwell House coffee at the turn of the century and includes a 30,000 square foot Georgian-style mansion with formal gardens and a museum of art with collections of American and contemporary painting and sculpture.

I had seen the work of Chihuly, a glass artist, at the Hunter Museum in Chattanooga last year and loved his work, and the added draw to Cheekwood was an exhibition of his glass art that was installed throughout the grounds of the estate. Chihuly has had a lifelong affinity for glasswork within botanical settings, and at Cheekwood he juxtaposed organically shaped sculptural forms with landscape that showcases nature and art.

One picture is worth a thousand words, and the glass pieces that were installed on the beautiful grounds tell the story of the integration of art with nature more eloquently than any of my travel pieces could. The photographs we took in the gardens appear below.

One of my favorites was a grove of cattails, rendered in slender orange glass, waving from the ground above a purple ground cover, which reminded me of the cattails that grow in Louisiana coulees.

Another installation of bamboo stalks intrigued me, particularly the story of their creation. In order to create the long, tubular shape of a reed, a glassblower was elevated in a mechanical lift while blowing through the pipe to make the form stretch, and another glassblower pulled the red glass toward the ground to form the beautiful bamboo trunks.

The Walla Wallas installation consists of multicolored beach ball floats that have long glass tips and are said to resemble eastern Washington State’s Walla Walla sweet onions. Visiting children were fascinated with this display.

And, of course, the silvered purple herons waving like cobra heads in the herb garden enchanted me. The herons are a product of Chihuly’s experimentation with blowing different shapes and using new techniques while he worked in Finland.

We didn’t stay late enough to see the glass pieces illuminated at night, but we lunched at the famous Pineapple Room Restaurant before leaving “the house and gardens that coffee built.” This visit to Cheekwood was a spectacular finish to our Spring and Summer sojourn in Tennessee.