Canadian loves Southern life, gardens

Montreal native Sandra Jonas says it was reading “Gone With the Wind” at an early age that formed her lifelong ambition to someday live in the South.

In 1993, when she was in her early 50s, her dream was finally realized. She and her husband, Earle, moved from Boston to Atlanta and began to immerse themselves in the history and the ambiance of the region.

“We embraced the whole thing,” she recalls. “We studied the Civil War, and we visited small towns looking for antebellum houses and good places for fried chicken.”

It took four years to find what they were looking for.

“I had this vision of a fabulous Southern garden,” says Jonas, a landscape designer. “I had requirements. I had to have an antebellum house and mature trees and enough land for all I wanted to do.”

In 1997, after having been disappointed by period houses that had been chopped up into apartments or were too far gone to restore, Jonas saw a 1 1/2-story Greek Revival house with beautiful proportions. The mature trees were there, and so was the land — over 6 acres just outside the city limits of Hogansville, about 90 miles southeast of Atlanta.

“I was holding my breath when I walked in that front door,” says Jonas. “But the rooms were wonderful. A young couple had done a great job restoring it. The house was built in 1844 and had been moved in the 1920s.”

The property turned out to be more of a challenge than Jonas had realized. The trees — mostly oaks, tulip poplars and “loads of dogwoods” — were tangled with wisteria, privet, honeysuckle, thick briars, thorny smilax and poison ivy.

Determined to be an organic gardener, Jonas eschewed any idea of herbicides and insisted on pulling everything by hand. But after about five months of intensive labor and seemingly getting nowhere, she ran into a landscape designer who advised her to “spray now and be organic later.”

Jonas says she’s glad she listened or “I’d still be cleaning brush and wouldn’t have a garden.”

On the plus side, the soil was rich, sandy loam. Jonas set about defining areas. She drew ideas from her new mentors, Margaret Moseley, whose Atlanta garden she visited often, and the late Penny McHenry, who introduced Jonas to hydrangeas.

Jonas is thrilled with the progress of her organic garden. Fancy chickens now roam about, and her husband Earle grows heirloom tomatoes and other vegetables in a French style potager, or kitchen garden. The Jonases grow raspberries, blueberries, blackberries, figs and muscadines. There is a camellia walk, a cutting garden that contains peonies brought from Canada, and a “circle of friends” garden (which Jonas says is really an oval) with plants from Moseley and McHenry.

About 2 1/2 acres are under intense cultivation, says Jonas, with plantings of a huge assortment of shrubs (viburnums, edgeworthias, spireas and corylopsis, to name a few) and at least 50 different varieties of clematis.

Jonas says she has her fair share of aches and pains from digging and weeding, but it’s all been worth it.

“I just love it here,” says Jonas. “This is my reason for living.”