Avery Island, Jungle Gardens

E. A. McIlhenny, the son of the founder of Tabasco Sauce was a noted naturalist and explorer. He cultivated the Jungle Gardens decades ago and in the late 19th century helped save the Snowy Egret from extinction by starting a colony and now some 20,000 Snowy Egrets and other water birds nest on the island each year on especially built platforms in a pond called 'Bird City'. Unfortunately we are here in the winter, the wrong time of the year and only saw one lone Egret, one Alligator, several turtles, even the camellias and azaleas were not in flower but we could see that in the spring or summer the gardens would be very pretty with the Spanish moss hanging from the gnarled oak trees.


Avery Island is like being on a mountain top surrounded by marshland and is actually the tip of a subterranean mountain of rock salt thousands of feet deep.