Longue Vue House and Gardens

This guide to Longue Vue House and Gardens in New Orleans follows a rare partnership: in 1934, landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, already called the dean of American women in landscape architecture, met philanthropist Edith Stern at a New Orleans garden club meeting. Unlike her hundreds of earlier commissions, tacked onto someone else's architecture, Shipman here chose the architects herself and planned house and grounds as a single eight-acre idea, with a different garden mood behind each of its four doors. Botanist Caroline Dormon filled the wild garden with native Louisiana plants instead of imported showpieces. Walk the grounds and follow the layout Shipman designed without a single change overruled.