Wednesday, March 21, 2001

Digging and building

Fayetteville couple's property a showplace of gardening and do-it-yourself construction projects

By MONROE ROARK
mroark@TheCitizenNews.com

The home of George and Ellen Long, on Ga. Highway 92 just north of Fayetteville, looks like most of the houses in the area from the road, with perhaps the slight exception of the Spanish moss growing on a tree in the front yard.

The moss, which George imported from southern Alabama, is a rarity this far north, he says. But more than that, it's a perfect example of the uniqueness of this home, especially the outdoors.

Walk to the back yard and you'll notice that this couple enjoys working outside. A closer look reveals a bit more.

"Everything you see here, we built," he said, pointing at the workshop, a shed, numerous benches and trellises, a gazebo all but the swimming pool and tennis court.

To say these two are handy around the house would be an understatement. The Longs have taken things that other people would send straight to the landfill and used them to make an outdoor showplace.

Take the shed, for example. When a neighbor tore down his fence about six years ago and was ready to throw out his scrap lumber, George asked if he could have it instead. A short time later, he had a convenient place to store various gardening tools and supplies, along with a number of fascinating things found in the dirt.

Having spent so much time digging for their assorted planting projects (George says Ellen is the gardener, and he's just the "strong back"), they have unearthed a few tools that were left decades earlier by whoever lived or worked there. Pieces of an old hoe, or a pair of pliers used only for square bolts these and other items hang on the outside wall of the shed to give the area a more rustic feel.

The gazebo that sits in the back yard has perhaps an even more fascinating history. It grew out of a photo in a magazine, with the help of a very old house in another county.

Ellen saw a picture in Southern Living of a gazebo in Newnan. She took it to George and said, "Build this." To this day, they have never seen the original structure in person.

So he went to work, and once again his neighbor was a big help. It seemed the neighbor's son had bought an old house somewhere between here and Columbus and was having to tear down a great deal of it to renovate it. "If you want any of the old lumber or bricks, just drive down there and you can have it," he said.

That was all George needed to hear. He brought back scores of old bricks from several fireplaces that stood in the old house, plus a lot of lumber. The results of that trip can be seen all over the Longs' 2.5-acre property.

As for the gazebo, a glance at the ceiling from the inside reveals burn marks on the wood from where it made up the wall behind the stove of the old house. "I thought about painting it, but I decided it looked better as it was," George said. "Now it's got a story behind it."

Bricks from the house surround the gazebo, and are also scattered throughout the garden and around the fountain in the Longs' front yard. They have a unique, aged look also.

One way to tell how old the bricks are, George says, is by seeing how they react to moisture and cold. If they get wet and freeze, the older bricks, which were made differently than modern bricks are made, can split. Then he replaces them.

The furniture inside the gazebo is made completely out of lumber from the same old house. Other garden benches in the back yard were made that way as well, and George is still using lumber from the old house to build things today.

George and Ellen recently were the subject of some attention when a huge white oak tree in their back yard was measured and found to be one of the largest trees in Georgia. It's one of 42 varieties of trees found on the property, George said.

One of the Longs' biggest projects underway now is the development of a "garden parterre," which is a French term for a garden that is symmetrical in its layout. When completed, this garden will have a round center area surrounded by four even corners, and observers will be able to walk around and through it to admire the various plant arrangements.

A kind of trellis, called a tuteur, is a common sight in the Longs' back yard. George has built a number of these structures that he has not even set up yet, and others for friends who ask him to.

This project also originated from a picture Ellen showed him, and after tweaking the design slightly to suit him, he came up with an excellent device to help give their gardens a third dimension allowing plants to grow farther up and even wrap around each trellis.

Across the driveway from the front yard fountain sits a stone wall, about two feet high and 60 feet long, running along the side of the driveway. The fact that it sits there at all is almost an accident.

Soon after moving in some 17 years ago, George was digging in the front yard when he came upon a large stone buried in the ground. The more he dug, the larger the stone became.

He unearthed that stone, then another appeared. When all was said and done, the entire stone wall was found underground, each piece lying on its side, in essentially the same order they now sit above the ground.

George stood them upright, cleaned them up, and added some mortar so the soil behind them (the ground is raised on the other side of the wall from the driveway) would not wash through the gaps. Today it looks like new. "I have no idea why it was buried in the first place," George said.

Maybe it's just to provide one more interesting story to go with one more interesting home project. As you pull out toward the highway and take one last look toward the house, you see the stone wall. And when you think about it later, you can't help but wonder what the Longs might be digging up today.

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