Over Thanksgiving break, I traveled home to New Orleans, Louisiana. It was great to get a break from the beginnings of the Vermont winter and to be able to go home and wear short sleeves. As a very urban community, New Orleans doesn’t have many unmanicured green spaces, but there are a few if you know where to go. Nestled in City Park between roads, golf courses, and sports fields lies the Couterie Forest. It is one of the only preserved natural places in the city. It rests north of downtown New Orleans in Lakeview and contains a whole system of bayous.
My new spot sat between the walking path and a segment of the bayou. It was a little spot to sit surrounded by trees on two sides and water on another. I sat there for about fifteen minutes and watched the water for an alligator, but I didn’t spot one.
Below was my view as I sat! As you can see, in comparison to my spot in Burlington, my new spot is still very green and alive. My dog Charley came along to keep me company!
Surprisingly, my new phenology spot reminded me a lot of my spot in Centennial Woods in Burlington. There were many maple trees at my new spot in New Orleans, just like in Centennial. There were obvious differences, like the bayous, the big palmetto trees, and the coloring. Unlike Vermont, which is already deep into stick season, Louisiana is still green and full of leaves. We never lose all of our leaves, but eventually the forest will look pretty grey. One of my favorite parts of New Orleans and the Couterie Woods is the palmetto trees. You can see them in the above photo: they look like ferns and are set like big fans. Relatively speaking though, my spot in New Orleans and my spot in Burlington look vaguely similar because they are both very understory heavy and full of bushes and vines.
The Couterie Forest and the park it sits in both mean a lot to me for a lot of different reasons, one of which being that a friend of mine passed away in this park, so the Couterie Forest always makes me think of them. I thought long and hard about what gift to leave here. I ended up just taking a pretty leaf off the ground and set it in the bayou and watched it float away, and took a few minutes to sit with the grief and the love and the acknowledgement of all that this land holds.
