Forest factory ships garden ornaments coast to coast

POMONA, Ill. — Charlotte and Daniel Ward meet for a kiss.

To the left, sunlight washes over the treetops of the rolling Shawnee National Forest that covers southern Illinois.

To the right, their fabricia in horto nostro.

The couple owns Classic Garden Ornaments Ltd. But everyone knows it as Longshadow. To the Wards, it’s their factory in a garden — the English translation of the Latin name the two dubbed their nearly 20-year project in southern Illinois.

It really is pretty romantic — if not necessarily easy to find.

Nine years ago, Springfield landscape architect and real estate agent Jim Fulgenzi took a trip to Pomona, an unincorporated corner of Jackson County with a post office in an old white trailer and not much else.

He was looking for a couple of accents to complete a garden at his new home on the corner of Illini and Cherry roads in Leland Grove. He had heard about the Wards’ work and decided to pay a visit to their factory.

Through Lebanon, Pinckneyville, Nashville and finally Murphysboro, Fulgenzi drove deeper and deeper into the bluff country of Illinois. Finally winding around to tiny Pomona, he got lost.

“The further I got into the Shawnee National Forest, I kept hearing the music from `Deliverance,”’ he said.

But Charlotte got him to their stop on Longshadow Drive — a sprawling estate with a white farmhouse, green barn and several smaller buildings surrounded by beautiful landscaping and a view of the national forest.

“I get down there and I see (Charlotte) running down a hillside in a white, long cotton dress and a big hat and she looked like something out of a French film. I thought to myself, `Is this real?”’ Fulgenzi said.

“And then her husband drives up in a peacock blue BMW convertible, and he is dressed very preppy ... I thought, `And these people settled in Shawnee National Forest in southern Illinois to do what? To make pots? How the hell could it possibly succeed?’ But it has.”

And then some.

Before the couple, both in their 50s, left the flatlands, Charlotte worked as a real estate attorney after graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Daniel, who studied photography and film at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, spent his time on leather making and was the curator of perennials at the Chicago Botanic Garden and horticulture director at Iverson Perennial Gardens. They met in the late 1980s at one of Daniel’s lectures.

Charlotte’s real love was not in legal briefs, however. At home, she and Daniel ran a gardening business out of their home in Evanston.

“Everyone on our block had a planter just so they wouldn’t call anyone,” Charlotte said, about the number of garden ornaments crowding her home in the city.

All that changed after a trip to Daniel’s former neck of the woods.

“One time, totally out of the blue, we stopped to visit George (Majka) and Jane (Payne) at Pomona Winery and they said, `There’s a really cute place nearby; do you want to buy it?”’ Charlotte said. When they discovered the 103-acre property had a waterfall, that clinched the decision to leave their jobs and life in the nation’s third-largest metropolitan area for the country.

“It was a big change,” Charlotte said. “All of our friends thought we were crazy.”

In addition to their jobs, the Wards left their small garden ornament business in Evanston. But it was the name it gave to the Wards that brought customers to their new ornament factory in southern Illinois.

The operation began with an idea: To produce limestone garden ornaments immune to weather and create the best product on the market.

The idea was born after a friend in Europe questioned why Americans were always buying European classic garden ornaments from Europeans instead of making their own.

Because they shared a passion for gardening and designing, the Wards made a break for it in a market that did not exist in great density in the U.S.

Today, they ship their products all over the country, and sometimes overseas.

The Wards started with the Lake Bluff planter, a shallow, round bowl — Fulgenzi bought three of them in 2002. It remains their most popular product. They have expanded from just a handful of employees in 2003 to 18 today.

Today, the Wards sell planters of all sizes — the largest weighing around 3,000 pounds — and have expanded to statues of animals and angels.

Building their fabricia in horto nostro began with tearing down a chicken house and rectifying erosion that was destroying the large barn on the property.

“We allocated about $35,000 to fixing the barn, but it ended up taking 10 times that,” Charlotte said.

Over time, the two tore down an old chicken house and built a grain bin for drying the products and a greenhouse to cure the Portland cement. They also annexed 20 more acres and designed a garden throughout the forest on their property.

Now, when visitors turn onto Longshadow Drive, Illinois is the last word in their mind.

Jerusalem Hill Road twists south of Pomona through the Shawnee National Forest, much of it gravelly and dotted with modest homes and farms. Junk is piled up at several nearby properties, and others offer utilitarian amenities.

But then there’s Longshadow. Security cameras watch the entrance, which is shrouded by bamboo — the first clue that this property is not like the others.

The drive leads past a beautiful white, two-story farmhouse restored to resemble a colonial home from the Eastern Seaboard.

Peacocks scuttle across the rolling lawn between the drive, a pond and the signature green barn, and two poodles — Abigail and Quincy — trot out to meet a newcomer. Charlotte, with her soft Hungarian accent and straw hat, smiles and whisks guests throughout the flowered grounds, nearly sterile factory buildings disguised as a French countryside estate.

Behind the handful of buildings that comprise the operation is a mowed path through grasses and several live oak trees planted to line the way to the true gem of the land: The Wards’ Longshadow garden.

Paths lead through the woods, where stone ornaments, urns and animals greet you at startling places. Under some roots that have grown in an arch lies a sleeping lion, and in the first creekbed are a dozen stone fountain faces.

As Charlotte leads a walk through her garden, she spots a single weed in what must be an acre of grasses.

“Charlotte’s the only person who would weed 103 acres,” Daniel jokes as she yanks at a brown stem.

Compared to what most farmers are charged with tending to, the Wards’ acreage is finely manicured instead of merely maintained.

To protect their otherworldly investment, and because the nearest fire district is about 20 minutes away, Daniel and Charlotte purchased a fire truck from an auction in Indiana and Daniel joined the Alto Pass volunteer fire department.

While the couple increased the size of their property, the number of orders grew, too. The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the city of Chicago, Chicago museums, churches, private residences and even the state of Illinois became customers.

The crew makes 15 pieces each day by pouring the Portland cement into molds that are either original creations or replicas of pieces the couple finds that suit their collection.

Only professional landscape architects and contractors are able to purchase the items, as the Wards want to ensure that the pieces are installed properly and without the risk of destroying their work.

The smallest planters cost just a couple hundred dollars. The largest planters can cost several thousand.

Purchases of what may be considered a luxury item dwindled a bit after the economic downturn of 2008, leaving the Wards with the possibility of layoffs in their operation.

“We had 24 employees before,” Charlotte said. “Business definitely went down. But the big projects that vanished in 2009 are now being requoted.”

Business is slowly creeping back to pre-recession health.

“It’s fun to be in the middle of nowhere and ship things coast to coast,” Daniel said.