Rip Van Winkle Gardens on Louisiana's southern coast, near the town of New Iberia, is a lovely garden with a very intriguing history.

Its blooms delight visitors to Jefferson Island, a hilly peninsula that developed when one of the mammoth salt domes beneath Louisiana's coastal marshes pushed through the surface of the swamp.

The island is named after Joseph Jefferson, a 19th century artist and actor who bought the island in 1870 and built the ingeniously designed home that still rests on the apex of the salt dome. But, the parent garden of the one that presently cascades down from the Jefferson home to the edge of Lake Peigneur was planted in the 1950s by Lyle Bayless, son of the owner who succeeded Jefferson.

Bayless visited several botanical gardens in Europe before he started his garden on Jefferson Island. Then, just when the semi-tropical shrubs he planted were starting to take hold, they were devastated by successive freezes in 1962 and 1963. In the next two years hurricanes uprooted several of Jefferson Island's ancient live oaks and blew away many azaleas and camellias. But, Bayless didn't give up. He reached into his rather deep pockets once again and replanted his garden.

Fortune smiled on this effort and by 1966 Bayless had decided to turn his island home into a showplace. He hired an English horticulturist to design and manage his floral exhibit and named it Rip Van Winkle Gardens in honor of the signature role Joseph Jefferson performed 4500 times.

The gardens flourished, and twelve years later, Bayless decided it was time for him to step aside. He donated the Jefferson home and its broad carpet of flowers to Live Oak Gardens Foundation, but he continued to live on Jefferson Island in a new residence he built on the edge of Lake Peigneur. The gardens assumed the name of the foundation and became known as Live Oak Gardens. All went well for two years. Then, on the morning of November 20, 1980, Bayless' home and his tranquil island were traumatically ravaged by an incredible catastrophe.

A Texaco drilling rig had been working in the lake and employees of the Diamond Crystal company were mining salt in underwater caverns of the dome. Because of a deplorable breach in communication, neither company realized that the other was operating in such close proximity. On that frightful November day, Texaco's drilling pipe penetrated the salt mine and set off a bizarre and destructive sequence of events. Inside the salt dome, miners rushed to elevators that could carry them to safety while water gushed toward them though the corridors of salt. A huge whirlpool formed on the lake and sucked in the oil rig, several barges laden with trucks and rock salt, and two boats at work in a canal that joins Lake Peigneur to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mother Nature, tipped off balance by human error, was playing rough that day. She drained the lake, pushed up a mud laden geyser, toppled Bayless home into the water, tore off a 50-acre section of Live Oak Gardens, and destroyed the greenhouses and conservatory.

Then, her anger abated. She refilled Lake Peigneur with waters from the Gulf and coughed up nine of the lost barges from the deep recesses of the lake. Miraculously, no lives were lost that day. When engineers advised that the earth under the gardens was stable, Bayless helped the staff rebuild Live Oak Gardens.

Jefferson Island has regained its beauty during the passing years, and a new management team recently took over the administration of the fascinating gardens that survived so many natural and man-made disasters. They are once again a showcase of horticultural beauty and are once again known as Rip Van Winkle Gardens. Bed-and-breakfast accommodations were opened in the gardens several years ago, a very fitting addition to gardens named for a legendary character who slept for 20 years.