Molding American Style
Two Midwesterners Cast Stones — And Break Free From British Rule

On misty mornings, if you squint just right, Longshadow Gardens does a convincing impression of an English country estate. And its owners, Charlotte Peters and Daniel Ward, decked out in barn jackets and wellies, easily pass for gentry as they hike through vivid green hills and woods dotted with stone troughs and urns.

Open your eyes wide, though, and visions of Sussex vaporize. This is country all right, but it's southern Illinois's Little Egypt region, where the Mississippi meets the Ohio, fried catfish rules, and the spring snake migration attracts spectators the way the Chelsea Flower Show draws royals.

Here in the town of Pomona, on a 103-acre farm overlooking Shawnee National Forest, Peters and Ward practice the old-world craft of dry-casting stone----with a new twist. Their Longshadow Planters, inspired by midwestern architectural traditions and native plants, look as American as the Illinois limestone they're made from.

On this particular misty morning, in a barn-cum-factory, artisans
hand-pack a crumbly mixture containing crushed limestone into fiberglass molds. One man, wooden mallet in hand, sits inside a five-foot-wide mold that will take him all day to pack.

Sleek fiberglass aside, cast-stone craft has changed little since it gained popularity in 18th-century Britain as a less expensive alternative to carved stone. Today, poured concrete is cheaper still (a Longshadow piece that runs $500 would cost half that in concrete, ten times as much in carved stone), but cast stone is more porous, so it can better withstand extreme temperatures.

It was that durability that attracted Peters and Ward to the material in the early 1990's, when they worked as garden designers on Chicago's affluent but weather-beaten North Shore. Though the couple's clients could afford imported cast-stone ornaments from Europe, the pieces----perfect for Norman farmhouses or Tudor manors----looked silly near the ranch, Craftsman, and Prairie-style houses Peters and Ward were often landscaping.

"No one," says Peters, "was making low, wide American bowls," planters like the turn-of-the-century ones she had seen in Evanston, the Chicago suburb where she and Ward were living at the time. She asked a manufacturer in England to cast simpler designs, but he declined. When Peters pursued the subject with a British friend, he retorted, "We don't understand why Americans can't make their own." That remark, she says, "was an epiphany for us."

She and Ward set about mastering the subtleties of reconstituted limestone in their garage and, in 1993, moved 370 miles south to their Pomona farmstead, which provides enough elbowroom for a team of pattern and mold makers, including recruits from the sculpture department at nearby Southern Illinois University.

Today, Peters and Ward still produce their earliest designs----a planter emblazoned with the branches of a native oak, sharp geometric containers that pay homage to Frank Lloyd Wright, bowls with egg-and-berry bands drawn from the work of Wright's mentor, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan----in addition to a new line by Atlanta garden designer Ryan Gainey. And, in response to a customer base that includes other parts of the country where older architecture styles prevail, they continue to offer a few neoclassical pieces.