Why We Started Gardenello
If you've ever followed a gardening guide from a national magazine and watched your tomatoes die in May, you already understand the problem Gardenello was built to solve. Most gardening content in the United States was written for temperate climates — USDA Zones 5 through 7, where summers are warm but manageable, soils are loamy, and plants follow a predictable seasonal rhythm.
Louisiana doesn't work like that. We garden in a subtropical climate with hot, humid summers that push most vegetables past their heat tolerance by June. Our native soil in Jefferson and Orleans parishes is heavy Vertisol clay — dense, poorly drained, and hostile to roots. Our best vegetable seasons run from September to May, not the spring-through-fall calendar that most guides assume. And the plants that thrive here — Turk's Cap, Louisiana iris, roselle, Creole tomatoes, Southern peas — rarely appear in national publications because they're specific to the Gulf South.
Gardenello exists to fill that gap. Every guide we publish is written with Zone 9b conditions in mind: our planting calendars reflect actual Metairie frost dates, our plant recommendations are tested in Gulf Coast heat and humidity, and our soil advice accounts for the Vertisol clay that most New Orleans area gardeners are working with.
Who We Are
Gardenello is run by a small team of gardeners, writers, and plant enthusiasts based in and around Metairie, Louisiana. We've been growing vegetables, ornamentals, and herbs in Gulf South conditions for years — long enough to know which advice works here and which was written for somewhere with a completely different climate.
Marie Thibodaux
A lifelong Louisiana gardener who has been growing vegetables and ornamentals in Jefferson Parish for over 15 years. Specialises in Gulf South vegetable production, native plants, and Zone 9b perennial gardening. Her seasonal guides are drawn from years of trial and error in the same clay soils and summer heat our readers face.
Darnell Boudreaux
A New Orleans-area gardener with a background in soil science and a particular interest in amending Louisiana's heavy clay soils organically. Darnell writes our composting and soil guides, drawing on both practical experience and research from the LSU AgCenter. He runs a large kitchen garden in Metairie with entirely raised beds filled with compost he makes himself.
Celeste Arceneaux
A Gulf South native plant enthusiast and landscape gardener based in Metairie. Celeste's focus is on plants that are genuinely adapted to Louisiana's climate — natives, naturalised species, and heat-tough ornamentals that survive and thrive without constant intervention. Her plant lists draw on years of observation in Jefferson and Orleans parish gardens.
Our Approach to Gardening Advice
We don't write about plants we haven't grown or conditions we haven't experienced. When we say a perennial "survives a Louisiana summer," it's because we've watched it do exactly that — not because a catalog listed it as Zone 9-compatible.
We also try to be honest about failure. Louisiana gardening has a high failure rate for gardeners following generic advice, and we'd rather tell you that French tarragon doesn't work here, or that most lavender dies in Gulf Coast humidity, than pretend every plant is possible everywhere. Honest, specific, local advice is more useful than cheerful generalisations.
Where we reference research — such as LSU AgCenter studies on nematode management or variety performance trials — we say so. We aim to be a trustworthy resource, not just an enthusiastic one.
