Avery Island is a salt dome in the south Louisiana marsh. It's not an island in the traditional sense being three miles inland from open water. It's a huge dome of rock salt that rises to as much as 160 feet above sea level and is about two and a half by three miles in size. It supplied most of the salt for the south during the American civil war. In 1868 Edmund McIlhenny founded McIlhenny company and began manufacturing Tabasco brand pepper sauce. They process and the peppers are all pretty much the same to this day. All of the Tabasco products are still made in this location. They produce about 700,000 bottles a day. The Buddha house contains a 900 year old statue of Buddha that was a gift to Mr. McIlhenny. The whole island is called Jungle Gardens and has a huge and beautiful variety of flora including azaleas, Japanese camellias, hydrangeas, irises, palms, papyrus sedges, bamboo, and wisteria. Ancient live oaks draped with Spanish moss are all over the island.

Mr. McIlhenny was a conservationist who helped save egrets from extinction. He searched the local marshes and captured six pairs of egrets in 1895. He built an aviary for them and released them in the fall to migrate south for the winter. As he hoped they returned in the spring bringing many more birds with them.The rookery in the lake is called bird city and is the summer nesting ground for more than 100,000 egrets today.

Mr. McIlhenny's son Edward, a naturalist and conservationist, had a relationship with the USDA ( U S Department of Agriculture ) and saw a lot of potential for bamboo. He planted sixty four varieties of bamboo in 1909. It's regarded as one of the most extensive collections in the world.