Lucie Monk Carter
“Candy” straight from the backyard is a treat for Rouse’s two toddlers.
Lee Rouse is always game for a do-it-yourself project, whether it’s inside the house he shares with his wife Brittany and two toddlers or outside in the yard.
Their mid-century house in Denham Springs is filled with furniture they found at thrift shops and sometimes on the side of the road. Their upcycled pieces include a hutch and a French chest of drawers. Lee does the necessary carpentry work, and Brittany does the repainting and upholstering.
“She has the eye, and I have the skills,” said Lee, 33, during a recent tour of their house and yard. “Our hobby is taking something that would be discarded and reworking it. Almost every piece of furniture we have was thrown away or given away.”
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Lucie Monk Carter
Inside, his home is filled with upcycled furniture, made functional by Rouse and made beautiful by his wife Brittany.
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Lucie Monk Carter
"Almost every piece of furniture we have was thrown away or given away," said Rouse. The living room décor changes from time to time depending on the couple's latest find; Rouse's wife Brittany repaints the above canvases to match the room's new colors.
“We did this when we were in college and had no money. As our income increased, rather than buy better objects, we bought better tools. There’s just something about knowing that your own hands built it.”
He carries that philosophy into the yard, where his biggest challenge has been replacing plants lost during the August 2016 flood. “Except for the trees, everything we now have in the front and back yards is from scratch,” said Rouse. Fortunately, his fifteen years of working in horticulture—in Houston, New Orleans, and now Baton Rouge—have given him a wealth of materials and knowledge to work with on the .68-acre property.
The yard includes Japanese yew that Rouse grew from seedlings, variegated ginger he propagated and divided, foxtail fern, elephant ears, a cedar that Rouse dug up as a weed in New Orleans’s City Park, and a Savannah holly that he moved from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. “In New Orleans I had a nursery business as a sideline. I grew material that local nurseries didn’t carry, because I didn’t want to compete with my industry. I grew unique orchids, bromeliads, and native plants such as buttonbush, Indiangrass, and switchgrass. Some of it ended up here.”
Lucie Monk Carter
Rouse, who will complete his master’s degree in Plant and Soil Systems in May, is the LSU Ag Center’s East Baton Rouge Parish horticulture agent.
While working for the Ag Center, he has conducted Master Gardener training classes for more than a hundred people. He has played an integral role in the development of the annual Farm to Table conference in New Orleans, while aiding the expansion of urban farming and community gardening in South Louisiana. He contributes columns to The Advocate newspaper, hosts the show “Bayou Garden” on WRKF radio, and started the East Baton Rouge Parish Master Gardener Facebook page.
Lucie Monk Carter
Lee Rouse.
It all started with a nursery job he took as an undergrad at LSU. “I worked at Clegg’s from 2007 to 2013 while studying for my degree in horticulture. The job helped my studies tremendously. I would learn a concept in school, and when a customer came to the store with a question—Why is this plant dying? What should I plant in a particular area? How can I deal with a pest in the garden?—I was able to help at a higher level.
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but working there and helping customers was studying. I was thoroughly explaining concepts I learned in school and applying them to real-world situations.”
Lee said his graduation from LSU in 2013, and marrying Brittany the same year, was the beginning of a busy five years that incorporated three jobs, the births of two children, three moves, and a couple of house purchases.
“That same year, 2013, we moved to Houston when I took a job as a propagation coordinator for Magnolia Gardens Nursery, a wholesaler.
Lucie Monk Carter
Rouse keeps a nursery in the corner of his backyard filled with propagated plants like pink oxblood lilies.
“I loved the job,” he said. “There were nineteen greenhouses. We took cuttings and grew plants; we had to be sure they rooted. At a given time, I was responsible for three and a half million cuttings in the greenhouses. It was stressful, but I enjoyed it. We had a fantastic crew.”
But like many Louisiana natives who relocate, the Rouses missed the food. “We went to a Target in Houston one Sunday because we wanted to make red beans and rice and Bloody Marys. The store had no Camellia beans. I had to call my mother in Baton Rouge to ask her what kind of red beans to buy. And there was no Manda sausage and no vodka. My wife and I missed Louisiana food. We never knew what we had until we moved away. We moved back within a year.”
They moved to New Orleans, where Rouse was hired by LSU as the parish horticulture agent in Orleans Parish, with an office in City Park. “I absolutely loved it there,” he said. “I worked with small vegetable producers, urban farmers, home gardeners, and the city to educate people on best-management practices of vegetables, turf, trees, and ornamentals.”
"My wife and I missed Louisiana food. We never knew what we had until we moved away. We moved back within a year.”
While working in New Orleans, Rouse bought a house in Harahan. “It was my first time owning a yard. I set up a vegetable garden [as well as] butterfly and hummingbird gardens. I grew edible landscaping like lettuce between shrubs.
“I’m doing the same thing now in Baton Rouge,” said Rouse, who worked in New Orleans for four years before moving back to the Baton Rouge area in 2017.
He grew up in the Garden District in Baton Rouge and had hoped to buy a house there. “We like the old-growth, mature landscapes, but were able to get much more for our money in Denham Springs,” he said.
[Read this: An interview with Dr. Neil Odenwald, the man behind the Southern Garden Symposium.]
He and Brittany, who teaches middle school, started looking in Livingston Parish. In August 2017 they bought a house that had flooded a year earlier.
“Honestly, there is nothing I can do to stop such a widespread flood as the 2016 flood,” said Rouse. “But that doesn’t stop me from trying small-scale solutions. There is a ditch in the back of the property that was clogged with trash—concrete blocks, leaves, and branches. I work to keep that waterway clear of material like that. I also work to keep the truly invasive species such as tree ligustrum, Chinese tallow, and Japanese fern out of the yard and waterway. No insects or wildlife eat them, so they tend to take over.
“We also try to keep rainwater on the property rather than trying to send it away as quickly as possible. The best place for a raindrop to go is right where it landed. We have a gutter downspout that goes into a rain garden and another that empties into a plastic tote that I use to collect water for my orchid and bromeliad collection. Brittany also collects rainwater to water the indoor plants.”
Lucie Monk Carter
Broccoli blooms in the Rouses' backyard.
The large backyard “is where we spend 90 percent of our outside time,” said Rouse. “I chop our own firewood for the fire pit. Arborists cut trees down and leave them in the neighborhood, and I pick them up. I love chopping wood.”
Among the trees Rouse has planted is a loquat (Eriobotrya japonica) or Japanese plum. “In New Orleans they call it Misbelief.”
A Satsuma and a Meyer lemon provide citrus, and Rouse recently put in four blueberry plants. “My kids love blueberries,” he said.
“It’s definitely a job being out here with a two year old,” said Rouse, whose older son can name all the vegetables. One bed has carrots as well as sweet peas that climb a bamboo teepee Rouse constructed. He pulls off a pod, pops it open, and offers his visitor a pea to taste.
“We call it candy; the kids love it. They love vegetables and fruit. In Walmart, my older son saw broccoli and said, ‘Outside!’”
He is growing three varieties of lettuce that can be picked multiple times. “It will keep producing foliage,” he said. “We’ll get about eight salads from one plant per week. We grow enough lettuce that we don’t have to buy it at the store for months. But this is a hobby. If something goes wrong, I can go to the store.”
He also grows purple cauliflower and broccoli. “I steam a lot of broccoli and cauliflower, and my wife likes to sauté them,” he said. “When we first started the garden, I was growing random stuff. Now I’m growing to the cook’s order.”
“We’ll get about eight salads from one plant per week. We grow enough lettuce that we don’t have to buy it at the store for months. But this is a hobby. If something goes wrong, I can go to the store.”
Two compost bins on the side of the house were gifts from family members. “One is a holding bin where I put new material, such as kitchen scraps, yard waste, and anything else that can be composted, including newspapers. It can take three or four months to fill up.
“The second is a finishing bin that you can turn over. I take everything from the first bin and throw it into the bin that turns. I turn it until it’s completely composted, then empty it into the yard.
“’I’d like to get three or four rabbits for quicker composting,” he said. “We can feed them the compost material, and their pellets are good fertilizer. Their manure is a cold manure, meaning that it can be added directly to the vegetable garden without having to be composted.”
[Read this: A look at permaculture practices in South Louisiana.]
In a back corner stands a shed where Rouse stores tools and pots plants at a potting table he made from scrap lumber. Just outside is the misting chamber he built. “I use the misting chamber to start vegetables and annual flowers from seed, as well as other seeds that I’ve collected from trees, natives, and other interesting plants. I also use the misting chamber as a propagation tool. It keeps a relatively high humidity until cuttings have rooted into the soil.
“I created a hydroponic system from scrap material from other projects. I spent less than ten dollars on it. It’s kind of M.C. Escher looking. I use it to grow different types of greens in the fall, winter, and spring.
“This is my Mad Scientist area,” he said, noting that even his wheelbarrow is a DIY project consisting of several “good parts” salvaged from construction sites throughout the neighborhood. “This is a wheelbarrow somebody threw away. I Frankensteined it together. I saved eighty bucks, but it took a year.”
Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net. Follow along with the Rouses on Instagram, @rouses_horticulture and @cedar_and_sage_living.
