By 1870, on the marshy salt dome of Avery Island, 140 miles west of New Orleans, Edmund McIlhenny experimented with hot peppers, ultimately creating a fiery sauce and founding the Tabasco Company. His son, Edward Avery McIlhenny, a naturalist and conservationist, sought to preserve parts of Avery Island for native flora and fauna. In 1895, he created Bird City, a bird sanctuary for snowy egrets in a small swamp. In the 1920s McIlhenny began transforming his estate and the working landscape west of his factory into a lush botanical garden called Jungle Gardens, an assemblage of discrete garden rooms highlighting exotic and tropical plants from around the world.
Opened to the public in 1935, the 170-acre, triangular site is parsed into various thematic gardens, accessed via a circuitous five-mile road and shorter walking trails which weave through natural live oak groves and artificial lagoons formed from the Bayou Petit Anse. Working with the industrial landscape, McIlhenny created a sunken garden from an arid gully and converted an open sand-mining pit into a palm garden. The gardens employ a diverse mix of azaleas, camellias, hydrangeas, juniper, wisteria, hollies and irises. An Asian-inspired garden adjacent to the bayou features a pond with an arched bridge, circumscribed by a stone path. Stands of giant bamboo create enclosure near a glass pagoda which houses an 11th-century statue of Buddha given to McIlhenny in 1936. The large Willow Pond to the east marks the bird sanctuary, the oldest feature of the garden.
