Signature: Gordon Page Mese

Age: 45
Occupation: Owner, Garden District Nursery
Hometown: Baton Rouge

After a rough season, southerners like to sink knuckle-deep into soil. There are signs of this in Gordon Mese’s hands.

He’s never left his work at Garden District Nursery, this plot of land where people come to see the seeds he has raised, to watch him fertilize roses and talk about the design of the city rising up around his bustling Government Street business.

Today we are sitting beneath Christmas cactus amid desert blooms getting ready for winter.

Gales and clouds mix with sunshine.

It is just days after the election in which Mese ran for mayor.

What he really wanted was to get people talking.

“It was a social experiment as much as it was an attempt to elect a mayor,” he chuckles. “I knew from the get-go I wouldn’t win.”

He spent no money on the campaign.

He drove with a single issue: for Baton Rouge to overhaul its unified development code (UDC), the regulatory document that dictates how the city is built.

Score one for the landscape architect: Many citizens now know what the UDC is. Armed with this insight, the people can dig for answers and calcify their notions.

Without a shift in the UDC, Mese says, plans like FuturEBR mean nothing.

“There are no teeth; there is no spine. It is just an idea.”

When the results poured in, the incumbent Kip Holden was the winner, hands down.

But Mese managed to carry nearly 7,000 votes—with many nods from people in influential neighborhoods like Pollard Estates, Southdowns and the Garden District.

Four years from now, will he shift his strategy?

Will he find funding for a full-fledged campaign strong enough to win?

Anything’s possible, he says. “I had a blast doing this.”

He’ll keep talking about the UDC and any other civic issues his customers want to discuss. The flowers and the dirt.

And for now, those “Mese For Mayor” signs in his shop window will stay.