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Wednesday, October 05, 2011

A Spectacular Live Oak Wedding


Spiders, gold dust, slave labor and Deep Southern grandiosity made for a legendary double-wedding in St. Martinville, with three miles of live oaks and pines as attendants.


image

The oak and pine allee at Durand’s plantation

St. Martinville, Louisiana

Photo: Musings of an Artist’s Wife

By James H. Wandersee and Renee M. Clary

EarthScholars™ Research Group

We live in a time of lavish and much discussed weddings—featuring royals, celebrities, and politicians. Recall such one-name sensations as Will and Kate, Kim and Kris, Chelsea and Marc. But we plant aficionados, following up various historical accounts, have been traveling over the past seven years to the site of a famous double wedding in which the trees out-glittered even the brides. In fact, nearly 150 years later, in south Louisiana at least, people still talk about those trees and go to visit them, even though the brides are now all but forgotten.

imageSt. Martinville, Louisiana

Map: Discover Our Town

Near the small Cajun and Creole town of St. Martinville, Louisiana, there lived a wealthy and sophisticated French sugarcane planter named Gerome Charles Durand. In the days of grand plantation homes, it was common to see a long, straight, allee or alley—a double-row, tree-canopied avenue—leading up to the front door. To make a grandiose visual impression, Mr. Durand planted a nearly infinite- looking, 3-mile-long, alley of Loblolly Pine (Pinus taeda) and Coast Live Oak (Quercus virginiana) leading up to his plantation home. One mile of that tree-lined avenue remains to this very day.


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Posted by Julie on 10/05 at 12:01 PM
Culture & SocietyGardening & LandscapeSecular CustomsPermalink