Category: Home and Garden

Heritage Quilts

180-year-old cloth square replicated in acrylics for
barn display

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Mandy Baughn

When Mike Jones’ great-great grandmother, Euphrasia Hannah Gibson, died in 1874, she left a box of quilt squares that she had intended to sew together. She probably had no idea those squares would someday hang in the homes of future generations, much less be replicated on wood and hung on a barn in Cropwell.

“My grandmother had the box of quilt squares, and when she died 15-20 years ago, her daughters rediscovered them when they cleaned out her house,” says Jones. “They got together and passed them out to each of the 14 cousins. So, we have had them that long. My daughter, Kristina Alexander, has one, too. I’m not sure who has the rest of that box of squares.”

Holding their quilt squares in front of the Jones barn are cousins Joy Sanford, Kathy Callahan (standing in for husband Jimmy), Walter Jones, Mike Jones, Michelle Dowler (for her mom, Gayle Boone), Karen Ragsdale, Christy Robbins (for her dad, Don Callahan, deceased), Carol Tucker, and Quinn Stewart (second oldest cousin at 83)

Kristina’s daughter, Jules, was 16 when she translated her 4th-great-grandmother’s quilt piece to a wooden board during the summer of 2023. Jules’ mom did the math and figured out how to enlarge the quilt block pattern to scale for a 6-foot-2.5-inch square piece of plywood that Mike cut for that purpose.

She put a screw in the center of the board and tied a string to it to make a compass, then used geometry to figure out the ratios. That was after Mike had painted three layers of a white base coat onto the board. Jules used a pencil to draw the design, a Dresden Plate with a star in the center and some extra colors in the corners.

“It took me a good while, because I had lots of coats to do,” says Jules. “I had to tape off each section to get clean lines. My grandfather picked the colors. He wanted something fall but bright and festive.”

Jules has been involved in art a long time, and usually prefers working with watercolors. She has painted stationery for friends and family, and helped groups from her church, Pell City United Methodist, to paint murals in a local private high school. “So, when my grandfather asked me to do this job, I was excited.”

The quilt squares are about 180 years old, according to Mike’s wife, Sandra. “The blocks were given to all the cousins in Mike’s generation.”

On Aug. 31, most of those 14 cousins gathered at the Jones House to celebrate Labor Day and compare their quilt squares. Each one features the same Dresden Plate design, but in a different color palette. Some have framed theirs, others haven’t yet. Each is proud of the heritage, though.

The Joneses hope their barn quilt will become a part of the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail. An agricultural tourism project, the Trail is designed to promote travel and community pride by encouraging the public to explore the state’s roads, farms, businesses and historic towns, according to its website. “Barn Quilts are part of what has become known as ‘The American Quilt Trail Movement,’ featuring colorful quilt squares painted on barns and buildings throughout North America,” the site states. “It is one of the fastest-growing grassroots public art movements in the United States. Tourists come to discover the quilt squares on thousands of barns and buildings scattered along driving trails throughout the nation.”

A Jones Family scrapbook displays a photo of Euphrasia Hannah Gibson (woman on right-hand page), among other family members

Regina Painter founded the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail in 2015, primarily in five northwestern counties of the state because of grant money from the Northwest Alabama Resource Conservation & Development Council. “We are very concentrated in north Alabama, but now have grant money from the Alabama State Council on the Arts to cover the entire state,” she says.

A fabric quilter herself, Painter saw her first barn quilt at a quilt show in Tennessee several years ago. “I fell in love with the idea and wanted to see them in Alabama. So, I started the Alabama Barn Quilt Trail with assistance from several groups and individuals.”

By registering with the Trail, a person encourages agritourism and promotes small communities across the state as visitors check out the beautiful quilt blocks and their settings, Painter says. “We promote the Trail with brochures, public presentations, social media and various television and printed publications.”

The organization will help anyone pick out a design and colors, and will register a barn quilt for the trail after forms available on the site are filled out and turned in. (See alabamabarnquilttrail.org). If, like the Joneses and at least half a dozen others in St. Clair County, you have already painted your quilt, you can still get it added to the trail. Interested barn owners may contact the organization by email (alabamabarnquilts@gmail.com)

According to the website, the benefits to communities and their small businesses include:

Providing an economic benefit from tourism for businesses and farms on the Quilt Trail
Promoting preservation of our historic barns
Honoring the agricultural roots of the State of Alabama
Creating public art and paying tribute to the uniquely American history of beautiful quilts.

The trail is supported by the Alabama State Council on the Arts, ALFA and the Alabama Farmers Federation.

Of the 204 quilts on the state trail, seven are located in St. Clair County. In some cases there may be more than one wooden quilt registered. The Ashville House of Quilts in downtown Ashville, for example, has three designs. Greensport Marina has one, and one of the marina owners, Beth Evans Smith, has three others registered at various buildings on Greensport Road. The Trousdale Family has three blocks at 22630 U.S. Hwy. 411 in Ashville.

A barn quilt at 4522 County Road 22 is registered to Mark and Emily Taylor of Ashville. But it actually belongs to Emma Bean, the granddaughter of Emily’s deceased sister and husband, Doris and Billy Bean.

Painted in 2022, Grandmother’s Flower Garden is the name of Emma’s quilt square. “This was her grandparents’ barn,” says Mark. “An Alabama Barn Quilt Trail crew drew the quilt pattern.” Father and daughter, Nathan and Emma Bean, along with other volunteers, painted it. The barn and the land it’s on was passed down to Emma from her grandparents.

“We have some at my business, Taylor Fence, at 4097 County Road 22, and at our home, 9463 County Road 31, both in Ashville, but they are not registered on the Alabama trail,” Mark says.

Quilter Joyce Foster, who lives on Belvedere Drive in Ashville, doesn’t have a barn and didn’t fancy mounting a large board on her garage, so she attached her 10-by-10-inch quilt square to her mailbox post. “It’s no particular design,” she says. “I just drew some lines on a piece of plywood and filled them in, then painted it. I think that was about four years ago.”

Gatway Community Garden

The place where hope grows

Story by Paul South
Photos by Mandy Baughn

From an acre of God’s good earth, a small army of volunteers at Pell City Community Garden helps feed the hungry

Ten years ago, Renee Lilly and like-minded people had a vision for a place where hope and fresh food grew for the food insecure.

On the old Avondale Mills property in Pell City, Lilly wanted to create a space where needy folks could learn to tend a small piece of God’s good earth and grow their own herbs, fruits and vegetables.

Two years later, Pell City’s Gateway Community Garden and its small army of volunteers moved to an acre or more of land donated by St. Simon Peter Episcopal Church across the road from the church.

The result? A bumper harvest, not just of fresh food, but of hope. The garden, Lilly said, has exceeded expectations.

When the garden began at Avondale, the hope was to inexpensively rent out plots to individuals to allow them to grow their own food. But there were few takers.

Renee Lilly and Rhonda Dial talk to a crowd at the garden

Two years later the effort moved to the church and the mission changed direction.

“We just decided, we’ll grow the food, and we’ll just distribute that food to the people who need it,” Lilly said. “Once we made that decision, everything just took off.”

Since 2018, the garden has produced more than 14,000 pounds of fresh food for county residents in need, Lilly said.

Volunteers – the number varies, but usually there is a core group of a dozen – tend, nurture, harvest and distribute seasonal fresh foods.

More have joined the effort. In fact, some 3,500 volunteer hours have been sown into the garden since 2018.

The work is vital, especially in a county where 13 percent of residents are food insecure, according to U.S. News and World Report.

“Boy Scouts have helped us. We’ve got the Boys and Girls Clubs, and other groups have helped us,” Lilly said.

Because the garden has been so successful, and because of its partnership with the Community Foundation of Northeast Alabama, it has been designated as one of 16 “Open Spaces, Sacred Places” sites located in nine Alabama counties.

Those sites are “intended for the encouragement of community well-being and resilience of mind/body/spirit of both individuals and communities,” according to the Community Foundation of Northeast Alabama website.

“Our garden is one of those sacred spots. It’s an incredible thing that we have that here,” Lilly said.

For Lilly, certain things make the garden sacred.

“It’s a healing and restorative garden,” she said. “Not only is it a working garden where we are harvesting chemical-free food out of that garden. We also have an area in nature where people can come and sit. We have a bench with a little book library, and there’s a picnic table in the nature area where people can come and reflect on the beauty of the garden.”

The garden wouldn’t happen without the collaboration with the Community Foundation and St. Simon Peter, as well as corporate and individual support, Lilly said.

Attendees tour the garden and grab food and drinks

Though a secular organization, Gateway’s work dovetails with the mission of the church by feeding the mind, body and spirit of those in need. “We’re serving people,” Lilly said.

The garden’s harvest changes with the season. This fall, cabbage, kale, Brussel sprouts, broccoli and Swiss chard made up the crop. In past years, collards were a fall staple.

Herbs – parsley, thyme, basil and mint among them – call the garden home.

What does the success of the Gateway Community Garden say about the people of St. Clair County?

“What it says was that there was a core group of people who decided that it would be nice for Pell City to have a community garden that could take care of people in need,” Lilly said. “I think that core group of people spread the wealth, if you will, with their hard work, and more people have joined that mission.”

There is a commonality they share.

“There is a love for serving and a love for gardening.”

Recent evidence of that growth, a woman who is a master gardener enlisted her green thumb in the garden’s efforts. Some volunteers are masters, others are newcomers to putting their hand to the soil.

“We have new people coming in and joining us all the time,” Lilly said.

One of the beneficiaries of the garden is a local senior center, where food is distributed. More than once, encounters with local seniors have assured Lilly that her vision was spot on.

“A lot of times, we get to see their faces when the food is brought in,” Lilly said. “They love it. They get all excited, and they run over to us to see what we’ve brought. It’s an awesome thing.”

Lilly recalled one senior who needed food during the Covid-19 pandemic. She was driving a vanload of cabbage.

“Would you like a head of cabbage?,” she asked the man.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with it,” he replied.

“You just put it in a pan with water, salt and pepper and cook it, and it’s awesome. You’ll love it,” Lilly answered. Cabbage may have won a new fan that day.

The problems of the underprivileged are often misunderstood or dismissed outright. Lilly sometimes hears that the reason her cadre of volunteers is not as large as it could be is “because they don’t want to distribute food to lazy people.”

As the product of a broken home that faced food insecurity, she bristled at the notion.

“I’m like, ‘Wait a minute, there are a lot of people who aren’t lazy who are just in situations out of their control. I understand people who are going through a divorce or they lose a spouse, or somebody gets sick, there are all kinds of situations where people need help,’” Lilly said. “That’s why we have been distributing healthy food to people in need since 2014.”

Along with its cultivation efforts, Gateway Community Garden celebrated its third annual fundraiser earlier this month. In exchange for a $20 donation, donors were given the opportunity to win a chest freezer full of beef and pork. Chili, white and red gave extra flavor to the event, along with live music. Polly Warren prepared the beef chili and Wade Reich of the popular barbecue eatery, “Butts To Go,” prepared white chicken chili.

Back in 2014, if someone had told Lilly that the garden would flower into a success, there may have been a few weeds of skepticism.

“I would have probably said, ‘I know it’s going to take a lot of hard work. But I would have never thought that it would be the place that it is today.’”

She added, “It’s an awesome space, and we do good work there.” l

Features

It’s a Barndominium

And it’s all built by hand

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Mackenzie Free
and Elaine Hobson Miller

What has 6,000 square feet, 185 hand-carved spindles and posts, 51 windows, 15 doors and is made of rustic pine and cedar? The barndominium on Alabama Highway 23 North built by Jeff and Shelley Main, that’s what.

“Barndomimiums are pretty big up North, I think because of all the dairy barns there,” says Jeff Main, architect and chief builder of the local project. “They’ll convert some, especially ‘bank barns’ (two-story structures built into a hill or bank) which usually have two or three cupolas on top. But they also build some new ones.”

It so happens that Jeff and Shelley are from “up North,” where they had a 1,200-square-foot home in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania, a rural borough in the South-Central part of the state. For 42 years, Shelley worked in nearby Hagerstown, Maryland, for a metal fabrication plant owned by David McCain. David is from Ashville, and the city’s McCain Memorial Library is named in honor of his family.

McCain retired a few years ago and sold his business, then the new owners retired Shelley. “He invited Jeff down to turkey hunt,” she says. “Both of us came for turkey season two years in a row. Then COVID hit.”

The centerpiece of the Great Room is the stone chimney flanked by pine-plank walls

For three months during the spring of 2020, the Mains lived in an apartment inside McCain’s barn across the lake. They fell in love with Ashville, McCain offered to sell them some property, and the couple picked the one on Highway 23 because of its lake view.

The house is a testament to the environmentalist phrase, “Reclaim,

Recycle, Reuse.” From the pine timber that forms the superstructure to the stones in the chimney, plus floors, steps and walls between, most of the materials used to build the house came either from the McCains’ Ashville property, the Mains’ property in Pennsylvania, and some material from the property where Shelley was employed.

They built their barndominium from pine logs furnished and sawn by Corey Young of Blue Mountain Sawmill on nearby Country Road 31. The stones and brick in the foyer and the bricks outlining the fireplace in the Great Room came from the foundation of an old shed and chimney left on their property. The Mains had to clear an acre of bamboo and brush just to get to the well and the shed behind it. There’s still quite a bit of bamboo at the edge of their “yard” to be cut down.

“Corey cut the timbers and the wide-pine planks for the upstairs floors, and I planed them,” says Jeff. “The live-edge steps leading to the upper level are made from weeping cherry trees from our yard in Pennsylvania, while those that are not live-edge are from the metal plant’s property in Maryland.”

Jeff, Shelley and some friends hand-stripped the wood for each stair step and the railing around the loft, including each of the 185 bannisters. Inside walls across the front of the house are made of reclaimed barn wood that had been stacked and stored for many years in a former dairy barn nearby. “We brought it home, and we pressure-washed it, bleached it, got the old paint off, then pressure-washed it again,” Shelley says. They bought the sliding barn-style doors in the house, but she also stained those.

Although he did a very rough sketch of the front of the house initially, Jeff says he really didn’t draw any formal plans. “It was all in my head,” he says. “My wife was very supportive. She didn’t know from one day to another what I had in mind or what I’d be doing.” Semi-retired as a ski resort mountain operations manager (he still works at a resort in Pennsylvania two weeks each month during the winter), he had the tools and the skills needed for construction. “We talked about it for years,” Jeff says. “But what we talked about was not what we wound up with. Normally, barndominiums are only one floor. We have a balcony all the way around the inside.”

“He told me the kitchen will be here, the bedrooms there, but other than that, I really didn’t have any idea of what he was going to do,” says Shelley, who, after 32 years of marriage, has learned to trust Jeff’s instincts. “I wasn’t sure about the front (inside), but it worked out for a dining room.”

The inviting front porch is filled with rocking chairs, plants and a swing. It leads into a small foyer, with the dining area to one side. The Great Room, its measurements of 40 x 40-feet – defining the word “great” – is flanked by three bedrooms and three-and-a-half baths, a kitchen, pantry and dining room. There’s an entryway at the front and a breezeway at the back that is really more of a breezy room than a breezeway. “I got the breezeway idea from the Looney House (historic home of dogtrot design), but that one went all the way through, front to back,” Jeff says. “I couldn’t talk her into that.”

Jeff made the two chandeliers, one on the front porch, and the other in the center peak of the Great Room ceiling. They are wagon-wheel styled and covered in deer antlers he found in the woods of Pennsylvania. The inside of the 37-foot tall chimney is hollow, with a metal flue and a ladder for accessing the inside of the chimney.

Downstairs floors are poured concrete. “The fireplace is a see-through, so you can see it from the breezeway behind it,” Jeff says. “We had the concrete work and fireplace contracted out.” They purchased the wood for the tongue-in-groove ceiling and the planks for the walls flanking it, but Shelley cut it, and Jeff installed it.

On one side of the Great Room is the kitchen, which features granite countertops, a brick backsplash, dark-green painted pine cabinets made by Joe Dickert of Big Rock Cabinet and Woodworks just up the road, a gas cooktop and two electric wall ovens. Next to that, on the outside wall, is a walk-in pantry lined with shelves on one side and a countertop on the other that has a small sink, coffee pot and microwave oven.

The wide-plank pine floors in the kitchen, like those upstairs, are 1 x 12s.“I’m going to build an island with another sink in it between the kitchen and Great Room,” Jeff says.

A guest bedroom suite also occupies a portion of that side of the house. Its walls painted gray, it features a stone sink with a slate backsplash and slate above the shower walls. The Master Suite and another bedroom and bath are on the opposite side of the Great Room. The Master Bedroom features a 12 x 12-foot cedar-lined walk-in closet that has its own furniture. The cedar came from fallen trees on the Ashville property. The closet has its own chest-of-drawers, dresser and some built-in shelving and storage.

The bedroom has yellow walls, and floorsthat Shelley stained, sanded, painted and sanded again to look like a white wash. Furnishings include a king size bed and a 4 x 8-foot mirror. In the adjoining bathroom, gray pebbles line the walls above the shower stall and create a backsplash behind the double sinks and granite countertops.

Shelley likes to make mobiles from shells and beads and “twisted sticks” from hand-sanded twigs she decorates with yarn and beads. She has her own craft room next to the breezeway. “This is my room,” she says. “That’s my son, two grands and three great-grands,” she adds, pointing to pictures on her walls and counters.

The house has two small, separate garages flanking the breezeway and craft room. There’s a storm shelter under one of them and a side porch off that garage that will eventually connect with the wide front porch. Standing on that side porch after a rain, you can barely hear yourself talk over the noise of the frogs and crickets. “They get really loud when it’s (weather) wet,” Shelley says.

Upstairs are his-and-hers seating areas that are bigger than their modest home in Pennsylvania. Hers, at the front end and overlooking the lake, is 15 x 40-feet, while his, measuring 20 x 40-feet, is at the back end. Walkways down each side of the loft connect the ends.

Her area features plants and what-nots on wide windowsills and picture windows overlooking the front porch, and two seating areas. One area has chairs and a daybed facing each other, along with a small television.

Shelley has a view of the lake from her side of the loft

The other has a chaise lounge facing the front windows, which are stacked, with the 60 x 60-inch version across the bottom and the 72 x 60-inch on the top. The latter is in a V-shape pointed toward the sky. An old quilt made by Shelley’s great-uncle hangs on the nearest loft rail, and one of Shelley’s twisted sticks rests atop the rail.

The walkways between the his-and-hers spaces display family treasures, such as WWI and WWII paraphernalia from both Shelley and Jeff’s dad and one granddad, including an Army jacket, rifle and two American flags.

At the back end of the loft is Jeff’s area, his “man cave,” as Shelley calls it. One side has large leather couches from their home in Pennsylvania, a bookcase displaying his collection of toy Hess trucks, and oodles of stuffed wildlife, most of which he killed himself. There are deer heads, turkeys, a coyote and a bobcat that was hit by a car on the road next to their house. The couches are on one side of the man-cave, a log futon and matching chair on the other, along with more display cases.

“We brought most of the furniture with us from Pennsylvania,” Shelley says. “A lot is family furniture, like the pedestal table in the dining room and the small, drop-leaf table in the Great Room that was my great-granddad’s.”

The china cabinet near the chimney displays glassware, jewelry, old gloves and other treasures that belonged to her great-grandmother.

All 6,000 square feet are cooled by a seven-ton air conditioner and heated by the fireplace and four mini-splits scattered about the rooms. Shelley admits the master suite is a bit chilly at times, though. She estimates they have about $200,000 to $220,000 wrapped up in materials, while Jeff believes that he probably saved about $300,000 by doing most of the labor himself. Shelley’s favorite feature of the house is its open, airy feeling, while Jeff most enjoys the fireplace.

In addition to the kitchen island, he has yet to finish the outside of the barndominium. This Spring, he plans to stain the outside walls a dark colonial gray.

So, what will they do when they are finally finished?

“It’ll probably never be finished,” Jeff says. Shelley just smiles.

Sewing Machine Mart

Springville’s place for sewing, quilting and learning

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Richard Rybka

Kathy Hymer drives up from McCalla to Springville for computer classes. Sheila Lankford drives down from Attalla for quilting classes. Both say it’s worth the miles for what they learn at the Sewing Machine Mart, a relatively recent addition to the Springville Station strip shopping mall.

“I’ve taken jelly roll race-quilt classes (so-called because the quilts work up quickly), crazy-quilt classes and a three-yard quilt class there,” says Lankford. “I love the Sewing Machine Mart.”

Hymer echoes the sentiment. “They’re great. I can’t say enough about them. I’ve taken (sewing machine) computer classes and quilting classes. Every machine I own has been purchased there.”

The Sewing Machine Mart originated in Tarrant in 1950, then moved to Homewood, where it remained for almost 30 years. Shawn Jackson, who owns the store with his wife, Heidi, started there in 1994, while he was working as a Birmingham firefighter. “I went there as a technician,” Shawn says. “I knew nothing about working on sewing machines but had always been a Mr. FixIt.” When the original owners retired In 2002, he bought the store.

About five years ago, the Jacksons moved to Gallant, and drove back and forth to their store in Homewood. “I pay attention to things and kept my eyes open for a place for the shop after we moved up here,” Jackson says. Then they got word that the building they rented had been sold and was to be torn down to make way for a restaurant.

So, in January 2022, they moved their store to Springville. “My wife shopped at stores in this mall, and we ate in restaurants around here, and one day we spotted this place,” Shawn says. “It’s where the old ABC store used to be.”

Rows and rows of liquor bottles have been replaced by rows and rows of sewing machines that do everything but talk. And some may soon do that. There are more than 40 on display, including a long-arm quilting machine and a couple of multi-needle embroidery machines.

Prices for the four brands they carry — Pfaff, Husqvarna Viking, Baby Lock and Singer —- range from $180 to $24,000. At least one machine is wi-fi enabled, so you can buy a design online and download it to the machine. It also has a built-in electronic tablet on one side.

“It’s amazing what technology is doing with sewing machines these days,” Shawn says. “I can remember when the first embroidery machine came out. It could do a 4 x 4-inch piece of fabric, and now we have machines that can do a 14 x14-inch piece. One of our Pfaffs has Artificial Intelligence. I’m not sure what that will mean, but I anticipate the customer being able to add new features to it, and AI will learn them. That machine also has a camera and built-in wi-fi.”

He doesn’t wince at some of the high prices, comparing them to the cost of hobbies such as golf and fishing. Women sometimes come in and tell him, “My husband just spent $50,000 on a boat, I think I can spend $20,000 on a sewing machine.” He does, however, advise potential customers to have a budget in mind before they come in. “We’ll help you find the most for your money,” he says. “You may still wind up with more than you can use, but you will grow into it.”

Most of the store’s customers are hobbyists that Jackson describes as “memory makers,” turning shirts, pants, ties and tees into quilts, for example. “Probably 20 to 25 percent of our customers, though, have some type of sewing or embroidery business, often in their homes.”

He believes sewing is more than a hobby now. It’s an art form. “It’s not just about making clothes for your kids,” he says. “Your imagination is your only limitation. We have some Cosplay customers, people who dress up in costumes to play video games and do other role playing.They’ll sometimes buy clothes at the thrift store and go home, take them apart and re-make them into a costume for Comicon.”

The Sewing Mart had no space for fabric in Homewood but started carrying some when it moved to Springville. They also carry storage cabinets, sewing machine tables, cutting tables made by a local man and notions (scissors, thread, needles, etc.). “We service all makes and models of sewing machines, with a one or two-day turn-around on repair jobs,” Jackson says. “We sharpen scissors, too.”

Some of their classes are machine or software specific, so a customer can get the most out of a new purchase. They offer several quilting and sewing classes that usually take four to seven hours on the same day, and cost from $25-$150. Some come with kits, others require a customer to bring her own materials. They offer summer classes for youth when there is a demand for them, although they didn’t materialize the summer of 2023 due to scheduling problems.

While Shawn teaches the get-to-know-your-machine classes, most others are taught by customers. Students make tote bags and cosmetic bags, learn how to bind quilts and how to do alterations. “We’re always looking for new teachers with new techniques,” Jackson says.

Customers come from all over Alabama, including Prattville, Auburn, Wetumpka, north Alabama, and from the surrounding states of Mississippi, Georgia and Florida. “Some lived near Homewood, but moved away, while others heard by word of mouth that we work on machines,” he says.

Kathy Hymer of Bessemer bought a 10-needle embroidery machine, a serger and a Pfaff Icon from the Sewing Machine Mart. The Pfaff Icon has a built-in computer and computer tablet. “I can send patterns over the Internet directly or through my laptop, or I can use a USB stick to transfer patterns to the machine,” Hymer says.”

She uses a program called mySewnet that she purchased from Shawn and Heidi to turn designs into patterns for embroidery machines. “I’m in an RV club, and I’ve taken pictures of my friends’ RVs, put them into this program and turned them into embroidery designs that I put on garden flags for them,” Hymer says.

The three-yard quilting class was especially fun for Hymer. “We picked out three yards of fabric we liked, and the Jacksons did the cutting beforehand,” she says. “You use the same pattern as the other people in the class, but depending upon the fabric, each quilt turns out completely different. We did a quilt top, we held them up and compared them when we finished. It’s a lot of fun to see what each person has done.” Hymer traded with The Sewing Machine Mart when it was in Homewood and doesn’t mind the drive to Springville. “I keep going because they’ve added fabric and because there’s so much more going on since they moved out there,” she says.

Lankford has made at least 10 jelly roll race quilts since taking the same class as Hymer. “I call them comfort quilts because I make them for friends and relatives who are sick,” she says. “They are about the size of a twin-bed quilt. I’ve also taken binding classes to learn how to bind a quilt after I put it together. “

A crazy-quilt class resulted in Lankford making a table runner, which her granddaughter is now enjoying while studying at the University of Alabama. “I’ve taken what’s called a three-yard quilt class, and I’ve made three of those. I’ve made jelly roll quilts for all my grandchildren, and I’ve just finished one for a friend who is special to me because he’s awaiting heart surgery. He’s a veteran, so I made it in red, white and blue and embroidered on it, ‘God Bless America.’ He told his wife it was his Linus quilt. It will be with him in the hospital.” Also, She worked on one for a giveaway on Attalla Heritage Day to benefit the Museum of Attalla.

She credits Shawn for taking care of her machines and Heidi for selling her beautiful fabric. “Sometimes Shawn tells me there’s nothing wrong with my machine, just with the ears of the operator.”

Seed + Sun

Mandy and son, Corbie, share a moment on a tractor

Story by Elaine Hobson Miller
Photos by Mandy Baughn

If you Google “poppies,” you’ll learn that poppies aren’t recommended for growing in this area (Zone 8), poppies don’t do well with root disruption, and poppies typically don’t bloom the first year they are planted.

Mandy Baughn’s poppy experiment defied all the odds and confirmed her idea to develop a flower shop by the side of the road.

That experiment began with a seed packet she picked up at a dollar store, planted in trays on her kitchen table, then transplanted into a garden bed. They survived transplantation, sent their roots deep during the winter of 2022-23, then bloomed beautifully their first season.

“I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to grow poppies to sell for many reasons, but for me, that first brave, pink poppy bloom was a sign and a confirmation that this is what I’m meant to do,” she says.

Seed + Sun Blooms, the name she gave her new flower business, involves growing a large variety of colorful flowers, arranging them into bouquets, placing them in Mason jars and selling them on the honor system in a little stand next to her house on Mays Bend Road. She charges from $5 to $40 for a bouquet, and purchasers leave the money in a lock box.

“They can take the flower jars home with them and keep or return them,” Baughn says. “Most folks return them, and some even bring me extra jars.”

She presented the idea for a flower stand to her husband, Scott, this past April. They had been on their 10-acre homestead for two years and had been tossing around ways to have it make some money. “I’ve always loved growing things,” Baughn says. “I come from a long line of green thumbs.”

She came up with this honor system, which, as she points out, isn’t the first in St. Clair County. “There are several in this area, including the Wadsworth Farm that sells blueberries and others who sell veggies. I’m a dreamer – it was my idea – my husband is the logical one. To my surprise, he said, ‘Let’s do it!’ ”

They had no tiller, no tractor and no experience in flowering farming. Then a friend explained the no-till method, where you lay a tarp down, and it kills the vegetation underneath, decomposing it and putting the nutrients back into the soil. So that’s what they did.

This growing season, the flower beds are covered with landscaping fabric, and she’s trying a gardening concept called the Cool Flower Method that a woman in Virginia named Lisa Mason Ziegler came up with. “You plant hardy annuals in the Fall, they over-winter, and do their thing in the Spring,” Baughn says. “Their roots are stronger because they survived the winter.”

In addition to the poppies, she grew sunflowers, zinnias, celosia, gomphrena, strawflowers, cosmos, marigolds, lots of Black-eyed Susans, Bachelor Buttons and more – all easy to grow, according to Baughn. “We hope to add tulips and daffodils this year,” she says. “We have 1,000 tulip bulbs and almost 500 daffodils already in the ground. We planted them during the first week of December.”

The “we” includes her husband and their two children. Son Corbie, 11, and daughter, Ellery, 9, help with the digging, planting and harvesting. “I have my own seed business, too,” Corbie says. They purchased a used tractor last November, which should help with developing the garden bed.

The whole affair has been trial and error, but has turned out even better than they had expected. “I have always grown things, but never from seeds,” she says. “I have been very surprised. I pictured people coming here just to get flowers, a destination, so to speak. But to my surprise, people in the neighborhood and passersby stop, some on their way home.”

Last year, after a late start, the stand opened in early July and closed in mid-December. Baughn estimates they sold 300-400 bouquets during that time. “Whew, that’s hard to think through and just a guess,” she says. They plan to open this year as soon as the bulbs start blooming, which could be as early as mid-February, weather permitting. “We’re hoping to have flowers at least through the end of October and maybe into November,” she says. Maybe we’ll establish a U-Pick patch with sunflowers and zinnias this summer. Obviously, everything is based on the weather.”

Mandy’s daughter, Ellery, takes her pick of flowers

The family wants to make enough money off the flower stand this year to fence their property. Then they can get some horses, sheep and chickens. “We love horses,” she says. “For three years, I taught riding lessons two days a week at RaeAnn Ranch in Moody. The kids, who are homeschooled, would go with me and had a ball roaming the ranch and taking riding lessons.”

She plans to set up a picnic table near the stand, a place for people to hang out, have a picnic, relax and enjoy the Spring and Summer breezes. “Our goal is to nurture community by building more of a community atmosphere so people can connect,” she says. “Young people are always on their phones, and older ones like to socialize. I want people to pass by and say, ‘How cute, let’s stop and sip our coffee at that picnic table.’ We may even offer coffee later. There’s a little bistro table out there now.”

It thrills her when people message her and say, “Someone gave me your flowers, and they made me feel so good. They cheered me up.” That cheers Baughn up, too.

“Flowers are a miracle of God, the way everything comes together to make them grow,” she says. “I go to the garden and know this is not a coincidence, and it strengthens my faith.” l

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Bonsai Master

Pell City man creates living art

Story by Roxann Edsall
Photos by Mackenzie Free

Blame it on Valentine’s Day. That’s when Boomer Meason received a gift from his wife, Melody, that would end up changing his life. The gift was a “bonsai growing kit,” which, he admits was a challenge for a man with the “brownest thumb ever.”

Thinking it would be fun, but not expecting them to survive, he dutifully planted the seeds. A couple of weeks later, after returning from a trip out of town to their home in Pell City, the couple was surprised to see the seeds thriving in their growing pots.

“At that point, I had no idea what to do with them,” Boomer confesses. “So, I got on YouTube and figured it out. I watched tons of videos and learned a lot. I learned that it’s not just what you can create, but that what you can do is limitless.”

Bonsai is not a type of tree, but rather, the cultivation of a plant and its aesthetics to fall within a specific set of conditions. Bonsai is considered both a horticultural practice and an art form. The goal is for the grower to cultivate a plant or a tree to be a healthy version of itself, but small enough to be grown in a shallow dish. In fact, the word, bonsai, literally means “tree in a dish.”

Melody wins award for her serissa bonsai

There is so much more than that, however, to understand bonsai. It involves learning as much as you can about each of the species that you are working with. It involves clipping, wiring, and weighing down the branches that need manipulation.

A bonsai artist must first see a vision for the plant. Then he sets about figuring out how to make the plant fulfill that vision.

Most of all, bonsai requires patience. Each of the phases of growing and training the plant requires grooming, then waiting for the plant to recover, waiting for changes to take effect, rewiring, pruning again, then waiting for the right season to make the next change.

A centuries-old art form made popular in Japan, bonsai evolved from the ancient Chinese art of “penjing,” which includes landscapes or scenes in a pot. The Japanese art put more emphasis on the tree itself.

Traditionally, bonsai are trees or bushes that are pruned to create a smaller version over several years. The mission of the bonsai artist is to create a tree that looks like a tiny version of a mature tree, but without obvious evidence of human intervention in the process.

A typical tree in nature can live to be hundreds, sometimes thousands of years old. In contrast, a well-cared for bonsai can live indefinitely due to the constant care and promotion of new growth given by the artist.

Boomer received those first seeds in 2020, shortly before the pandemic changed so much in the world. “I always ask people if they have a COVID hobby,” he laughs. “My wife’s is kayaking. Mine is bonsai. We couldn’t do a lot of the things we normally did, but we spent a lot of time working on these. I spent the whole first year trying to not kill the trees.”

He took to the hobby like a duck to water. His “brown thumb” now a thing of the past, he has close to 300 plants in various “pre-bonsai” stages. It has taken more than three years to accumulate that many plants to work with to create bonsai. He has more than two dozen that are in shape to be considered officially show-ready bonsai.

Pencil drawing by Boomer’s grandmother, artist Evelyn Whatley, included with the display at the bonsai show

Although both his mother, Leah Whatley Meason, and his grandmother, Evelyn Whatley, were artists, he has never had an outlet to develop his artistic talents. He admits that his career in manufacturing does not always engage his artistic side. It does, however, make it possible for him to fuel his passion financially.

Buying that many plants at nurseries to work with can be costly, but Boomer gets about 20% of his plants from the wild, a practice known as “yamadori.”

Typically done in the spring, just before the plant’s growing season, a bonsai artist digs up plants from the wild, along with dirt from around the plant, brings it home and nurtures it to help it recover from the shock of transplanting. When the plant is ready, the pruning and training begins.

Another technique involves creating new plants from established ones from cuttings and air layering. A propagation technique similar to grafting, air layering is the practice of cutting a branch and wrapping the “wound” with special moss to encourage the growth of a new plant.

“You do everything in bonsai according to what the species needs and what the tree is telling you to do,” says Boomer. “Bonsai people probably know more about roots than most botanists do. The texture and nutritional details of the root systems are so important. When you do serious work on a tree, and you reduce the root system, you must reduce the canopy to make sure it can still survive.”

The deeper Boomer dug into his new hobby, the more information he craved. He began messaging questions to some of the YouTube video creators. He read all he could find on the subject.

World-renowned bonsai master Peter Chan’s book Bonsai Beginner’s Bible became his go-to guide. He spent countless hours watching channels like Chan’s Herons Bonsai. “His videos are geared toward people who want to get into it, but not spend a lot of money,” Boomer explains. “The way he works on his trees really helps you. And he speaks to you in a way that’s easy to understand.” Another bonsai expert, Ben Kirkland of Appalachian Bonsai, strongly suggested that Boomer get in contact with his local bonsai society.

At first, Boomer wasn’t ready to share his artistic efforts with anyone else. After picking his way along the path for three years with only the internet as his teacher, he finally reached out to the Alabama Bonsai Society (ABS).

The group meets for monthly workshops and to encourage each other and share the progress of the plants they’re working with. They also hold an annual show at the Birmingham Botanical Gardens. Boomer can’t say enough about how the group has helped him. “I’ve never worked with a more positive group of people,” he adds. “Their support and advice were so helpful in building my confidence.”

Through the Alabama Bonsai Society, Boomer met John Walker, who curates the Meyers Bonsai Terrace at Aldridge Gardens in Hoover and is one of the best trained bonsai artists in the state. Boomer buys some of his plants through Walker’s company, Walking Tree Bonsai, which sells mature bonsai and plants ready to transform into bonsai. He also admits to “hanging out at Hazelwood’s” (nursery) at least twice a month scouting for plants to transform.

Sometimes treasures can literally be found in your back yard, like the Chinese privet Boomer dug up from his yard in 2021. The plant was still healthy, but not thriving, so he put it in a container and began working with it. Over two years later, he entered it in the ABS annual bonsai show and won his intermediate level in the broadleaf evergreen category.

“I have a lot of American Elm trees, wisteria, flowering plants, red maples and azaleas that have come out of my yard and from my mom’s yard.” says Boomer. He says the easiest to work with is the Chinese privet but added that he’s had the most fun with ficus trees because one of his mentors, Nigel Saunders, works with them and has given him a lot of inspiration.

A bonsai can be created using almost any plant with woody stems. Generally, one can expect to spend a minimum of two years pruning and cultivating a tree to get it small enough to thrive in a shallow dish (a requirement of bonsai).

ABS’s bonsai show director Anika Paperd explains. “Some species like a trident maple that grows quickly, you could do it in as little as two years. You’re going to begin refining it to develop the branches and shape. We use wiring and pruning techniques to cause the branches to split to make them spread and form a canopy on the tree.”

One of the most fascinating aspects of bonsai art is that it is never finished. That’s because the tree continues to grow and react to its environment. The artist must continue to maintain it and adapt it as conditions change. “It’s much like being a sculptor where your sculpture is breathing and continues to grow,” Paperd emphasizes. “It’s a constant progression.”

From start to that continued progression, a bonsai is all about the vision in the mind of the artist. It is nature inspired and human coerced. “Every time you work on it, you’ll either find a new inspiration or another aspect of it that changes it. Or you just keep working on the original plan you had envisioned,” says Boomer.

“You are trying to create the aesthetic of a really old tree in something you can pick up and carry around,” Boomer concludes, holding up a tiny juniper bonsai that is springing from a crater in a softball-sized rock. “My wife found this rock while kayaking. We both thought it would make a great container for a bonsai. So, I planted a Chinese juniper in the hole, and it’s pretty cool.”

Melody has now joined her husband in his hobby. She has developed her skills to the point that she, too, brought home an award at the spring bonsai show for her serissa plant, a deciduous evergreen.

Boomer’s quite a few years shy of retirement, but he says bonsai will be important in his future plans. He looks forward to the additional hours to devote to his art. As to whether he will ever be able to see a profit from his work, Boomer admits that he’s not sure if he’ll ever be able to part with his creations. “There’s a little bit of me in each of them.”

And those Valentine’s Day seeds? One of the black spruce seeds lives today as a beautiful bonsai on Boomer’s back deck. Not bad for a guy with a brown thumb.

Editor’s note: Next year will be Alabama Bonsai Society’s 50^th Anniversary. Their mission is to bring awareness to the community and to share the art form of bonsai. For more information about bonsai and the Alabama Bonsai Society, check out alabamabonsai.org.

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