River Road Rambler: A Curious Traveler along Louisiana's Historic Byway

4. For the Life of a Garden

27 4 For the Life of a Garden Francois Gabriel Aime, born in 1797, was nicknamed “Valcour” by a family nurse. He married Josephine Roman and the couple lived with the bride’s widowed mother. Valcour bought a nearby property on which to build their own home, but when Mrs. Roman Sr. died, Josephine’s second brother, Jacques Telesphore, inherited her plantation. Valcour acquired it from him, leaving Jacques with the tract that is now the famed Oak Alley Plantation. Valcour and Josephine spared no expense in refurbishing, enlarging , and furnishing their home. In 1842, with input from his wife, he began planning an extraordinary garden. Soon, Aime was renowned for it. Following the death of his son Gabriel in 1853, however, the tycoon sank into despair. With the succeeding deaths of his wife and two daughters, he sank into a depression, ceased having an interest in the garden, and turned over his business to a son-in-law. Valcour Aime died in 1867. John Burnside of Houmas House Plantation subsequently purchased the Aime Plantation for its sugar property, paying no attention to either the grand house or its extraordinary garden. Scott unlocks a rusty iron gate nestled into a crumbling brick pillar and waves me through the wedged opening. We’re on private 28 River Road Rambler property that happens to be his. The gray chill of the day exaggerates the dull palate of the landscape as we begin to bushwhack through brown and tan and muted green, clambering over fallen trees and picking through tangles of vines that have woven themselves into netting among the dense overgrowth. We should, he mutters, keep a wary eye out for snakes. I’d seen this place from the River Road many times, a stand of trees encircled within the unbroken lines of cane fields. It looked like a wilderness, more suitable for hiking with the Sierra Club than the site of a legendary nineteenth-century garden created and owned by the equally legendary sugar baron, Valcour Aime. But here it is, a tenand -a-half acre footprint within a protective fence, the most tangible vestige of the grand lifestyle of Valcour Aime, who was known as a wildly successful planter, experimenter in sugar processing, and bon vivant. He called his property the St. James Refinery Plantations but others referred to it, apparently without malice, as “Le Petit Versailles .” Nothing remains of the resplendent Aime mansion; it burned in 1920, reducing to ash what was left of the three grand staircases, checkerboard marble floors, and dining room fashioned after one at the Château de La Rochefoucauld in France. It had been in that very room, in fact, that one of the best-known stories about Valcour Aime was born. According to lore, Aime wagered a dinner guest from France the then-princely sum of $10,000 that everything presented on the gold table service at his table had come from his property— from the turtle, wild fowl, vegetables, salads, and fruits to the coffee, cigars, wines, and liqueur. When the guest challenged his host on bananas , coffee, and tobacco, Aime shepherded him through the plantation ’s carefully tended conservatories and hothouses and duly accepted his winnings. In the 1840s and 1850s, the River Road was one of the richest regions of the country. Neighboring plantations were gloriously enhanced with oak alleés, formal landscaping, and thick groves of orange trees, but Valcour Aime dreamed of something entirely different . He wanted to transform the land between his house and the Mississippi River into what landscape architects today call a jardin For the Life of a Garden 29 d’anglais-chinois—an English garden with Chinese influences, a popular style in England and on the Continent in the mid-nineteenth century. In an 1842 diary entry, Aime noted that the ground was being prepared “for an English park.” The resulting landscape was unlike any other American garden of the period. It was enclosed within a high brick wall lined with fragrant shrubs. A massive iron entryway from the River Road opened onto a broad shell driveway leading to the house, which was crisscrossed by other smaller drives. Discrete gardens and sweeps of lawn had been created to appear informal and natural. Interspersed throughout were water features—a manmade stream and ponds fed by water pumped from the Mississippi—and follies such as a small mountain, a grotto, a...