A Little Oasis

At Ninth Ward Nursery, bamboo grows as "art you can walk through"

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Mark Sanders, the founder of Ninth Ward Nursery, did not anticipate becoming a New Orleans bamboo icon, but paying off student debt can lead to unexpected vocations.

It began with a two-storey house that loomed over Sanders and his then-wife’s backyard, removing any semblance of privacy for the couple when spending time outside. Sanders, who already had an affinity for gardening, remembered there was a type of non-invasive, clumping bamboo that could provide a natural screen when planted in a line. He found a supplier and purchased $100-worth of bamboo—an amount that turned out to be more than his small yard could accommodate.

“So I decided to sell a few plants and upcharge them a little bit, and then make a bit of my money back,” Sanders recalled. “As soon as I posted an ad for those plants online, they sold out. And I thought, ‘Wow, that was an easy way of making money.’”

He turned his initial $100 investment into $200, which he turned into $400. “And then I scaled up, and started learning about propagating bamboo,” he said. “I learned that I could take one plant and turn it into two plants. So instead of doubling my earnings, I would start making vastly more on each sale.”

“I always have these monkeys in my brain that are just doing somersaults and running around and playing. And being in a garden helps calm down those monkeys." —Mark Sanders

Selling bamboo from his backyard turned out to be a convenient way to pay off his student loan debt—with the added bonus that propagating bamboo was something he actually enjoyed. After a few months, his then-wife suggested he officially start a business, since he seemed to derive so much joy from the venture.

In December 2015, he purchased an inexpensive property in the lower 9th Ward, which was still reeling from Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic flooding a decade before. Sanders, a journalist by profession with no formal horticultural training, then set about learning to grow and maintain a plant nursery.

It was just the beginning of what would become an unlikely gardening destination in the city—not just for those seeking guidance on different types of bamboo, but also for anyone searching for a little peace, greenery, and shade amid the chaos of everyday life.

“I can be somewhat compulsive, by which I mean I'll get an idea, and no matter how impossible it seems, I cannot let go of it until it happens,” Sanders said. “There is really no practical business reason why I should spend so much time trying to create this sort of urban jungle in an infrequently visited part of town.”

Sanders’s childhood was idyllic, filled with memories of lush outdoor adventures. He grew up in northern Alabama—a city child, but one who lived on the edge of a forest.

“Ever since I can remember I've always loved spending a lot of time outside,” he said. “My mother is a master gardener, and so being outside, being with my mom in the garden, was just … my ideal way to spend the day.”

Those youthful experiences forged within him a dedicated, constant yearning for physically and intellectually stimulating endeavors, and a drive toward careers that would push him outdoors (he has a master’s degree in archaeology). According to Sanders, he has spent time in about a dozen states and traveled extensively, even traveling to New Zealand as a teenager. This urge to explore, coupled with apparently boundless energy, would serve Sanders well as a journalist. And his eagerness to learn about new subjects and delve more deeply into every facet of them would also ultimately contribute to his passionate escapades as a gardening guru.

“When I was a child, I was never very good in school, but I was always somewhat proficient at learning things on my own,” he said. “If I found something that I liked, I would get hyperfixated on it.”

For the past ten years, the something has been bamboo—and that interest has grown into a larger captivation with horticulture and landscape design.

[Read this: Raising Cane—Growing and maintaining bamboo in South Louisiana]

Now the editor of BAMBOO Magazine, the official publication of the American Bamboo Society, Sanders immerses himself full-time in the nuances of the plant and spends his time talking to experts who gladly fuel his interest. He doesn’t expect everyone who visits the nursery to know everything (or even anything) about bamboo, and he has a spiel prepared for hesitant buyers.

“Not all bamboo is invasive,” Sanders said. “There are over 1,400 species of bamboo in the world and counting, because new species are still being discovered all the time. And many of them do not become invasive.”

Those non-invasive varieties grow in a clump, a cluster of contained shoots ideal for privacy screening purposes. Say you wanted a twenty-foot privacy screen; five plants, about four feet apart from each other, would create a wall of soaring greenery. For his purposes, Sanders searches for diversity in the bamboo he carries, though he primarily focuses on the types that will best flourish in South Louisiana and the Gulf Coast environment.

Once you account for climate zones and humidity, things get more interesting. Sanders carries some plants that only reach twelve feet tall, while others tower at sixty feet when fully mature. Some of his bamboo is powder blue, some yellow, some green, some variegated; some are thick and robust, others are thin and stately. The clear favorite among his customers is called, somewhat whimsically, graceful bamboo (Bambusa textilis gracilis)—ideal for smaller yards and urban settings.

Apart from a successful business venture, the nursery also quiets what Sanders describes as an active mind, creating a haven for contemplative thought and the relief of something real, tangible, and present.

“I always have these monkeys in my brain that are just doing somersaults and running around and playing,” Sanders said. “And being in a garden helps calm down those monkeys. Being in a plant nursery also helps calm down the monkeys. Being in people's yards and beautiful spaces helps do that.”

In many ways, Sanders has always been dreaming about someday-plants and their homes. He cites a litany of sites that have inspired him visually over the years, from temperate forests in New Zealand to botanical gardens he has sought as a refuge on his many travels: Denver Botanic Gardens, Marie Selby Botanical Gardens in Sarasota, and Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, among others.

These are the gardens that danced through his mind, in riotous color, when the coronavirus pandemic stilled the world in 2020 and early 2021. He had already expanded his initial operation, incorporating tropical plants in addition to the thousands of varieties of bamboo, in 2018. But now, Sanders decided his nursery would morph into “a botanical garden where the plants are for sale.” That became his mission during lockdown—to build out the nursery, drawing on landscape design that inspired him.

“I think of landscape design as art that you can walk through,” Sanders said. “It's multi-dimensional. It's multi-sensory. You can smell it, you can see it, you can hear it, things on the tree you can taste, you can touch things. There's so many different tactile things in a garden, and that's what really continues motivating me.”

Arranging plants in a pleasing, interesting way has stirred Sanders’s imagination for decades. As far back as 2003, when he first bought a house in South Florida, Sanders would spend large blocks of time sitting in a lawnchair in his backyard, studying the blank stretch of grass (save a lonely kumquat tree) and envisioning his future garden.

[Read this: Grow Dat—In the middle of New Orleans's urban sprawl, a seven-acre farm grows youth leaders root to stem]

Eventually, he would mow the grass as short as possible—”like a crazy person”—and take a can of spray paint, deliberately marking spaces on the lawn where he wanted to place different plants.

Today, Sanders continues to search for small moments of drama in the grand design of the nursery. Since he has no formal training, part of his practice involved reverse engineering the processes other people underwent to create their exterior spaces and gardens. The intentionality, from colors and textures to height and topography, fascinates him.

“You can do a lot with hills … little hills and little ponds,” he said. “God, you can create a crazy garden. I've often said that if I was not running a bamboo nursery, I would be designing miniature golf courses.”

Rather than rows and rows of plants laden with price tags in an impersonal, martial line, Ninth Ward Nursery is a communal experience, a peaceful pause, a space for positivity. Since Sanders’s transformation of the space, the nursery has become a sort of magnet for creative types intrigued by its tropical, escapist feel, or simply enamored with its beauty. A music video has been shot there, along with a film and several dozen photo shoots. Sanders has (quite proudly) hosted a friend’s birthday party, and even arranged a petting zoo there. The buying and selling of bamboo in such an environment feels almost incidental, a fact that does not appear to bother Sanders.

“I’ve always looked at gardens as a sort of refuge, and I know that I'm not alone in that,” he said. “I know that that's a very common thing, and so being in these places, it's hard not to be inspired.”

The Friday after the historic snowfall in New Orleans this past January, Sanders was in a bad mood. His tropical plants, which he had tried to keep warm and safe during the freeze, had been exposed to the icy temperatures when he was stranded and unable to tend to them for two days.

“The good news is, the bamboo is fine. It looks a little beat up, but it's fine,” he said. “The bad news is, the tropical plants are absolutely just … they just got destroyed.”

Undeterred, he took to the company’s social media to mourn, but also to dutifully remind customers concerned about their purchases that their bamboo is “stressed, not dead” from the cold.

Sanders is not one for complaining, and he knows other folks had it worse than he did, but he was not thrilled by the outcome. He envisions the nursery as a haven, a sanctuary in a part of the city that was flooded with feet of water during Hurricane Katrina when the levees failed along Industrial Canal; he feels strongly about keeping it lush and vital as a part of the community it has claimed as its own. Amid the crumbling remnants that linger even twenty years after the hurricane, the nursery is a sign that things grow again.

“Block after block after block, you will see foundations of homes that are no longer there, and then right in the middle of it is this little oasis that takes up two residential lots and is completely walled in, and is surrounded by bamboo on the inside, and it's filled with boardwalks, and water features, and antique statuary, and a collection of antiques, and a couple cats, and a sign that says, ‘Ask us for a free popsicle,’” Sanders said. “As much as I like doing business with people, I genuinely want people to come to the nursery, and even if they don’t buy anything, to have a pleasant experience in this little oasis.”

ninthwardnursery.com