The landscaping ideas of a Mississippian who grew up on a ranch and a woman whose roots are in Cuba come together in a backyard on Hyacinth Avenue.
Bertha and Travis Taylor are lawyers, grandparents, dirty fingernail gardeners, recyclers and chicken keepers.
“Our grandson, Adler Rice, who’s 6, goes out there to ask the chickens to lay him a couple of eggs for supper,” Bertha Taylor said.
Taylor grew strawberries in pots.
“After I saw Adler pop a berry into his mouth,” she said, “I said, ‘OK, no more spraying.’”
The Taylors have a small, comfortable den, overlooking the yard, where they poured wine for visitors one Sunday afternoon.
As informal as that room is, when the couple lets their hair down they retire to a second den in the yard that Bertha calls “the parrot room.”
Stuffed cloth parrots and parrot electric lights honor the memory of Bertha’s Cuban grandmother and a parrot named Pépe.
“When I was a little girl, our city home was with my grandmother in Guantanamo,” Bertha said.
“We lived in Borjita and Los Canos — those are two small sugar mill towns I remember. My father was a sugar engineer, a mechanical engineer. He got his degree from Clemson.”
When Bertha was 10, her parents, Guillermo “Mr. Bill” Iturralde and Monserrat Iturralde, moved to Alma Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish.
As Bertha Taylor talked about her childhood, another part of her brain described the arrangement she’d just put together using pentas, roses, butterfly bush, zinnias, lantana, salvias and milkweed from the yard.
A huge hackberry tree and towering pines provide an open setting for camellias, azaleas, roses, wisteria, Mexican sage and the aforementioned cut flowers.
Scattered through the yard’s flower beds are vegetables, herbs and yard art that includes Bertha’s saint statues, antique watering cans and some of Travis’ birdhouses made from scavenged wood.
Travis uses his Explorer to collect from neighborhood curbside trash piles the materials he needs for constructing sheds, a greenhouse, the parrot room, rustic fences and gates.
The parrot room is furnished with comfortable chairs and is partially shaded by an arbor draped with wisteria from Travis’ grandmother’s garden.
Travis’ parents, James and Mary Taylor, live on a cattle ranch in Hattiesburg, Miss.
A greenhouse tucked away in a side yard looks like a reassembled curbside trash pile.
“Really, anything I think I can stuff into the Explorer — lumber, pots, iron that I weld into trellises,” Travis said.
“People don’t take things off our trash pile,” he said. “They figure if we’ve thrown something away, it’s had it.”
The parrot room is an outside entertainment space and a portal to Travis’ childhood in the country. What appears at first glance to be a large painting of old gardening tools, is a doorway at the back of the parrot room that leads to Travis’ tool shed.
Fountains in sugar kettles and freestanding ones help mute the sound of traffic on Hyacinth.
The front yard is sparsely planted compared to the back which means fewer limbs to block float throws during the Southdowns Mardi Gras Parade.
“When the parade passes, everyone in the front yard ends up in the backyard,” Travis said. That can mean a hundred visitors to the garden. The Taylors have left plenty of lawn to accommodate the outdoor cocktail party.
At the moment, the parrot room opens onto a screen of okra beyond which is the chicken coop, home to Silkies, Dominique and Buff Orpington chickens.
Chickens that don’t lay or become too plentiful are shipped off to a friend who has a farm.
“Rita (a Rhode Island Red) needs to go into the cooking pot,” Travis said. “She hasn’t laid an egg in two years.”
“We don’t eat our pets,” Bertha said.
The Taylors have been married 17 years, each married once before.
“This place didn’t look like this when I was a bachelor,” Travis said.
Not much is done by design in the Taylors’ yard. Designs that do occur are usually the work of Bertha.
The easy answer to why they have chickens, Travis said, is “Bertha wanted chickens.”
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