By Sally Pearsall Ericson
Director of Marketing and Public Relations

For the first time since 1999, a new captain is taking the helm at Bellingrath Gardens and Home. Dr. F. Todd Lasseigne, the former President and CEO at Tulsa Botanic Garden, will step into his new role on Sept. 1, 2020, replacing Dr. Bill Barrick, who retired in July 2019.

So, who’s the new guy, and how does he pronounce his last name? More importantly, which tailgates would he attend, if the 2020 football season were to permit him to do so? Here are a few pertinent facts about Dr. Lasseigne, gleaned during a wide-ranging Zoom interview:

His horticulture roots run deep.

Dr. Lasseigne grew up in Thibodaux, La., with parents and grandparents who loved gardening. “It was in my blood,” he said. ‘I knew in high school that I just wanted to do this.” He earned his first degree from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then moved on to the University of Georgia to earn his Master of Science degree in horticulture. In the midst of his studies, a new opportunity arose: The Martin McLaren Horticultural Scholarship from the Garden Club of America, which led to a 10-month fellowship in the United Kingdom.

“I studied gardens, horticultural history, plant conservation — everything you can think of,” he remembered. He learned about plant conservation at the Kew Gardens in Richmond, took classes at Reading University and visited, by his estimate, “probably 85 gardens” during his fellowship. “I put 13,000 miles on that car in one year, which is a big deal in England,” he said. “It really cemented for me a love for the garden side, because I thought I was going to be a college professor.”

After returning to Athens and completing his degree, he headed to N.C. State University in Raleigh, N.C., to earn his doctorate under the tutelage of renowned horticulturist J.C. Raulston, who was credited as a major force in introducing new plants and revitalizing the U.S. nursery industry. However, in a tragic turn of events, Raulston was killed in a car crash in 1996, at the end of Lasseigne’s first year of study. “It was a life-changing experience for a great many people, and certainly for me, because I wanted him to be my mentor,” said Lasseigne, who began taking on several of Raulston’s duties while continuing work on his Ph.D. in horticultural science. Lasseigne taught courses in plant identification and became an assistant director at the arboretum at N.C. State, which was renamed in Raulston’s memory.

He’s an international plant finder.

Raulston had been actively finding new plants and introducing them to the nursery industry and to the public, so Lasseigne took up the role of plant explorer as well. “I was kind of the head plant geek,” he said, working with nursery representatives and gardens officials across the country, particularly in the Southeast and Pacific Northwest. He also did expeditionary work in England and in the Republic of Georgia, which led to fruitful international connections.

“I was asked to present to the Japanese Nursery Association on Southeastern U.S. horticulture, and that began almost a decade-long career of me going to Japan about every other year and lecturing to these various groups, and I have developed a lot of really great relationships with these Japanese nurserymen,” he said. “ … We were able to introduce a lot of really interesting plants that had not before been introduced from Japan into the U.S. That was a lot of fun.” His international plant explorations include trips to southwestern China and Mexico.

Lasseigne’s next stop was tiny Kernersville in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, where he was hired by the Ciener family in 2005 to create the Paul J. Ciener Botanical Garden. As its founding executive director, he led a small staff that transformed “an abandoned Dairy Queen and seven acres of kudzu” into a botanical garden with a volunteer group, a friends group, educational partnerships in the community and a calendar of events.

In 2011, he was hired to take the reins of the fledgling Oklahoma Centennial Botanic Garden, now renamed Tulsa Botanic Garden, where he oversaw a new master plan for its 70 acres of gardens, established the site’s first “Garden of Lights” holiday exhibit, expanded fundraising efforts and raised the annual attendance from 2,000 to upwards of 35,000.

Here’s how to say it:

The last name of this Thibodaux, La., native is pronounced “Lah-SANG.” “In truth, I barely say the ‘G,’ but it’s easier to explain by just telling folks the second syllable is ‘sang’,” he explained. However, he’s fine with the simpler, familiar address of just plain “Todd.”

He’s a cat person.

He and his wife, Heather Toedt, are the proud parents of four feline fur babies. “When I moved to Tulsa in 2011, I was single but had two cats – cleverly named ‘Boy’ and ‘Girl,’” he said. “As things would go, I ended up meeting the woman of my dreams almost instantaneously through the great connected universe of horticulture and gardens.” Heather Toedt’s grandfather, Dale Toedt, was one of Tulsa’s first landscape architects in the 1950s, and she grew up working in her grandparents’ garden center. The couple married in 2013 and set up their blended family with Heather’s cats, George and Gracie.

“Heather and I share a passion for plants, connecting people through plants, gardening, gardens, and landscape architecture,” Lasseigne said. “When we travel, we look for wildflowers, cool natural areas, beautiful gardens, nurseries and garden centers, and anything horticultural.” (During their honeymoon, they visited Bellingrath Gardens, of course.)

He’s a huge football fan.

He professes a deep-rooted love of the SEC, but – “much to the chagrin of Alabama fans” – he roots for Georgia, where he earned a degree, and LSU, the flagship university of his home state. He’ll also cheer for Auburn if the situation merits it.

He’s glad to be back home.

“Having not lived in the Gulf Coast region for 30 years, I look forward to this return to my original horticultural zone,” Lasseigne said, noting that Thibodaux is only a three-hour drive away, so it will be easy to visit his mother and many members of his extended family. “Heather loves the beautiful pines and oaks of the Deep South, and so she’s excited for new gardening adventures, including visits to Alabama’s famed beaches, where she’ll be looking for seashells.”

By Tom McGehee
Museum Home Director

Following Mrs. Bellingrath’s death in 1943, Walter Bellingrath hired a local antiques dealer to inventory the contents of his home.  Nell Curran had sold Mrs. Bellingrath a number of pieces in the collection and in writing the inventory she added comments about many of these beautiful and unique objects.

But it was not just the fine antiques she inventoried.  When she came to the kitchen she listed the contents of all those cabinets, answering the question posed by many of our guests.

Pots and Pans

The list includes saucepans, a pressure cooker, double boilers, pots, several roasters (including three stored in the oven), biscuit pans, cookie pans, pie plates, cake pans (both round and square), a tea kettle, a coffee urn and three coffee pots.  Interestingly, the vast majority are described as having been made of aluminum, and in several cases the familiar Wear-Ever brand is mentioned.

Wear-Ever aluminum cookware was introduced in 1903 and forever changed the American kitchen. Up until that time cookware was largely cast iron and besides being heavy, it was prone to rust. The use of aluminum changed all of that.

The only cast iron to be found in the kitchen in 1943 was a Dutch oven, a graduated set of frying pans and two pans for cornbread shaped like corn.

In addition to metal cooking implements were some items made of Pyrex glass, including a double boiler, an electric percolator, three mixing bowls in graduating sizes and 28 “individual bakers” or ramekins. Pyrex was created in Corning, New York in 1915 and was used for laboratory equipment as well as kitchenware. Opaque glass was added in the 1930s.

Equipment

There were a number of pieces of kitchen equipment listed, including three meat grinders, a potato ricer, a flour sifter, a churn, a glass rolling pin, two large strainers on stands, a kitchen scale, a pair of ice cream freezers, three electric waffle irons and a Sunbeam Mixmaster. The Mixmaster had been introduced in 1930 and became so popular that it was immortalized on a U.S. postage stamp in 1998.

Also stored in the cabinets were a “leather lunch kit” with two Thermos bottles, six Thermos pitchers with matching trays and “a large Thermos cooler for bottled drinks.” The Thermos brand name has been a household word since being coined in 1903, and derived from the Greek word for heat.

Those Thermos pitchers would have been filled each evening with ice water for the bedrooms in the Bellingrath Home – a reminder that air conditioning had not yet arrived and an electric fan and a glass of ice water made those summer nights more bearable.

Sadly, little of all that kitchenware survives. There is a breadbox, a chrome percolator, a tea kettle, the kitchen scales and a couple of the Thermos pitchers. The remainder of all the items once so necessary for a busy kitchen apparently vanished long ago.