Photo by Paul Christiansen
Jeanette Bell
Jeanette Bell has been growing flowers in New Orleans for more than thirty years, providing florals and herbs for local restaurants while maintaining a renowned collection of roses.
Off the beaten path in New Orleans’s Central City, a rose-adorned fence offers glimpses of a secret garden through its wrought-iron pickets. Behind these gates, Jeanette Bell lives out her retirement dream, tending her flowers and herbs (and supplying both to restaurants and florists around town) in her beloved Fleur D’Eden.
“I’m eighty, and I’m retired, but I have a good reason to continue working because I enjoy the people I meet,” explained Bell, who is a neighborhood fixture and often toils alone in her 9,000-square-foot garden. “I mean, I’m selling flowers to a chef who won the James Beard Award!” She’s talking about one of her latest clients, Chef Serigne Mbaye of the award-winning Senegalese restaurant, Dakar NOLA. Her flowers adorn the tables in the restaurant.
[Read about Dakar NOLA, here.]
Bell’s floral adventures began forty years ago in Detroit, where she and her husband moved from her home state of Mississippi. Originally a teacher, Bell took a break to raise her children and became involved with her neighborhood garden, where a love for flowers bloomed. Deciding she wanted to plant commercially for the City of Detroit, Bell dove into horticulture studies and successfully passed the city’s exam and interview—though alas, she didn’t get the job. Undeterred, she started a small business planting flower beds for commercial establishments.
“My first account was with an advertising agency,” reminisced Bell. “I planted the window boxes with hanging geraniums, and then I would go once a week, take a hose, and water them from the ground floor. People started calling the agency because the window boxes were so pretty.”
Bell’s business spread through word of mouth, and she soon began providing flowers for tables at small restaurants in the area. “Forty years later, I’m still doing that,” she grinned. After leaving Detroit, the family briefly came to New Orleans, where Bell grew bedding plants in their rental’s backyard and sold them at the farmer’s market across the Mississippi River. Then, they headed to California, and Bell started teaching again and working as an administrative assistant, while still dabbling in gardening. In 1990, they returned to New Orleans—this time to stay. Bell took a job with Scholastic while selling flowers at the farmer’s market.
“I started following the Harvard Study on Aging,” Bell explained, proudly adding that her daughter went to undergrad at the university. “They advocate that while you’re still working, [you should] decide on the job you want in retirement, because it’s very important to retire to a job. So, while I was working for Scholastic, I started preparing for this job.”
“I loved roses all my life. I wanted to write a book about roses because so many people don’t know much about them." —Jeanette Bell
She set about growing her flower business by acquiring a blighted property on Baronne Street in 2003 and naming it Fleur D’Eden. She moved her flowers over from the community garden and started transforming her new property into a rose garden.
“I loved roses all my life,” explained Bell. “I wanted to write a book about roses because so many people don’t know much about them. They think the long-stem bud form is how you get a rose. So, I set up the garden with around 500 bushes and got a photographer here. I was writing the text when Katrina came.”
After evacuating during the hurricane, Bell returned to the city and discovered the area’s chefs were having difficulty finding fresh herbs—a need she could fulfill.
One of her first clients was Chef Ian Schnoebelen at his restaurant Iris, and later, Mariza. “He always wanted basil—cinnamon and lemon basil, Lacinato kale, thyme, parsley, mint, and each year, I would grow him a selection of peppers,” she detailed. “He wanted a variety of hot peppers to make a pepper sauce for oysters. He would can it, and you would see it displayed in the restaurant. He always wanted them as close to ripe as possible because they were sweeter that way.”
When Chef Steve McHugh was at Restaurant August and then Lüke, Bell provided him with fresh bay leaves. “He had such an aversion to dried bay leaves that he wanted to acquire land to grow them himself,” she laughed. “He also wanted five pounds of fresh dill per week.”
Even making room for the herbs, Bell still maintains 300 rosebushes in Fleur D’Eden. Kathleen Currie of Smoke Perfume makes a rose glycerite out of Bell’s Cramoisi Superior rose, a crimson flower that dates back to the 1800s. “I call it my garden mascot because it covers the whole front of my garden,” said Bell. “It was given to me by a friend who died at 100 years old the year after Katrina, so it always reminds me of him.”
Bell and her garden have been featured in two books, Grace Bonney’s Collective Wisdom: Lessons, Inspiration, and Advice from Women over 50 and American Roots: Lessons and Inspiration from the Designers Reimagining Our Home Gardens by Nick and Allison McCullough and Teresa Woodard. “When I said yes to American Roots, little did I know I would be in a book with million-dollar gardens,” Bell giggled. “I haven’t read it myself because I don’t want to intimidate myself by looking at what other people have. I just want to focus on what I do.”
Even at age eighty, Bell is still trying new things in the garden. She is determined to grow a Medallion rose; an heirloom known for its massive, apricot-colored blooms. “It’s my favorite rose,” she explained. “I grew it as a test rose over forty years ago in Detroit because I wanted a beautiful plant that I could look at out the window while washing dishes. I’ve tried to grow it ever since, and I’ve failed miserably. It’s the only rose I cannot grow successfully, but this year, I will spend any amount of money to buy that rose again because I really want to enjoy it.” In the meantime, Bell will keep living her dream, gardening amidst the flowers she loves and sharing them with others.
