Collection: Indigenous & Bayou Heritage | The Plants That Built Louisiana

Before Louisiana Had a Name, It Had These Plants

The bayous, prairies, and bottomland forests of Southwest Louisiana were tended, harvested, burned, and planted by the Chitimacha, Houma, Atakapa-Ishak, and Choctaw peoples for thousands of years before the first European ship entered the Gulf. The landscape that French explorers called a wilderness was in fact a managed garden — a vast, multi-generational relationship between Indigenous people and the plants that fed, healed, clothed, and sheltered them.

This collection is a living record of that relationship. Every plant here — Sassafras, Louisiana Iris, Pawpaw, Yaupon Holly, Buttonbush, and Black-Eyed Susan — carries a documented history of use and meaning in the Indigenous nations of the Gulf Coast. They grew here long before we arrived. They will grow here long after us. They belong to this land.

Plant them as an act of recognition. Tend them as the people who knew them first once did.

Plants in this collection: Sassafras · Buttonbush · Louisiana Iris · Pawpaw · Yaupon Holly · Black-Eyed Susan

All plants sold as live 1-gallon specimens, grown in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Descriptions are for horticultural and educational purposes only.