Botanical notebook painting: Angel’s trumpet

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angels, botanical art, gardening, illustration, New Orleans, Val Webb

One of the things I like best about visiting the garden district of New Orleans — along with the lovely old buildings and the tantalizing assortment of cafes and galleries — is the landscaping. No, really. Looking through the scrolled ironwork, catching glimpses of lush courtyards and tiny gardens, it seems to me that everything planted in the Crescent City grows three times larger than its horticultural counterpart here in Mobile. And while I have seen a few good-sized angel trumpets growing in local front yards, they are simply enormous in NOLA. Here, they are shrubs. There, they are practically shade trees.

In her wonderful book, 100 Flowers and How They Got Their Names, Diana Wells writes that Thomas Jefferson had a scientific interest in these pendulous and highly narcotic flowers, but his curiosity stopped short of exploring their medicinal potential. Laced with scopolamine, they induced a deep unconsciousness that sometimes proved permanent. In his garden diary, Jefferson noted that the seeds were carried in the vest pockets of artistocrats during the French Revolution, as a sort of botanical suicide pill in the event the bearer was dragged off to the guillotine.

 The angel trumpet’s darker side, although utterly fascinating, seemed a little grim to be included in my latest botanical notebook painting. So instead of doomed French noblemen I drew the graceful plant’s namesake. And a few odds and ends about its floral anatomy. I hope you enjoy seeing it!

And here, also is a better image of the previous botanical notebook entry, the rose:

Hurricanes and hotels

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economic recovery, hurricane, New Orleans, southern authors

New Orleans woke up this morning to an old, familiar anxiety. It showed in the faces of coffee shop patrons just after sunrise, grimly watching The Weather Channel. It showed in a sudden, loud exclamation overheard in a gas station: “If it happens again, if it comes here, we’re leaving and we’re never coming back.” It showed in the headlines of today’s Times-Picayune:

Exactly three years after Katrina drowned the city, another August storm is churning into the southeastern Gulf of Mexico. Gustav is barely a Category 1 on the Saffir-Simpson hurricane scale, but its projected path will carry it across the deep, warm tropical waters that fuel wind and rain. And nobody in battered, beautiful, slowly sinking New Orleans wants to think about wind and rain.

The Perfect Man and I spent a couple of days down on Royal Street this week, taking care of some family business and soaking up creative inspiration in what must surely be the most literary hotel in a city crammed to bursting with notable southern authors living and dead. Hotel Monteleone has been about the business of charming the socks off its guests (famous or not) since 1886. 

Truman Capote was conceived in one of its rooms, and would have been born there if anxious hotel staff had not carried his mama off to a nearby infirmary to deliver him. Ernest Hemingway loved the old place — particularly the revolving gilt Carousel Bar, added in 1935 — and he wrote about it in The Night Before Battle. Likewise Tennessee Williams, in The Rose Tattoo. And Eudora Welty, a regular and beloved guest, immortalized the Monteleone in The Purple Hat.  William Faulkner lived in the hotel for a time during the 1920s, in the early days of his writing life. 

 This grand old place is a time machine, from its wedding-cake facade on Rue Royale and gleaming marble floors to the glass letter chute that starts on the top floor and ends at the big brass mail box in the lobby. As New Orleans struggles to return to its pre-Katrina economy, we continue to find that even the finest hotels are offering bargain rates. The French Quarter crowds are still sparse. In the arts district, some galleries have vanished and others stubbornly hang on while the city’s population numbers creep upward — but there’s a long way yet to go. And another hurricane won’t help.