There may have been serendipity at play when Kristin Taylor rolled up to an old abandoned home almost 43 years ago and noticed a “for sale” sign posted in the yard.

 

     Kristin and her husband, Bill, were in want of a home and this one was in want of an owner and repairs… lots and lots of repairs. So much so that Bill kiddingly said the house looked as if it were levitating, its foundation raised so high on bricks you could practically see the house’s underbelly.

 

     But Kristin knew that very day, as she sat outside the 19th-century structure situated across from Glendale Shoals Preserve, that she had finally found the house of their dreams. Not just a place to call home, but a place they could rescue and turn into an oasis with Lawsons Fork Creek flowing nearby.

 

     Today — 150 Japanese Maples trees later, countless evergreens, a dozen four-ton boulders, and numerous garden vignettes — the home is now nestled behind a variety of vegetation painstakingly picked and planted by the Taylors. In a continuous act love for the historic home and three others they purchased, the Spartanburg couple have never been at a loss for projects. They even discovered a new variety of Japanese Maples during their work to enhance their surroundings. The tree, which is now being sold at a nursery in North Carolina has taken on the name of one of its founders — Kristin’s Star.

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     Standing on their wraparound porch that once had no railing, Kristin and Bill pointed to the flourishing Japanese Maples that took root in their yard with foliage so dense it blocked the view of the narrow street running in front of the house. Kristin’s Star, a dwarf Japanese Maple with bright orange and yellow leaves — some tinged pink and coral — is growing further down the property and lent its cuttings to another one that was planted across the street.

 

     When the Taylors bought the house in 1983, the only trees in the front yard were two old oaks that succumbed to disease. Kristin said the work to landscape both the front and the back yard started years after moving in. Back then, she said, all their focus was getting the house back to its original state, or maybe even a little better.

 

     Kristin and Bill had been living in Converse Heights when they started their search for a larger house in the early 1980s. They were looking for an old home with lots of character, something that could be brought back to life for future generations. Their search took them to outlying areas of the county, but either the homes were badly renovated or too expensive. So, while the home in Glendale fit the bill, costing them only $20,000, they had no idea how much work was in store for them. That changed when the realtor gave them a key to take a look inside.

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     “We bought a shell. I mean it really was,” Kristin said. “Everything was pulled down.”

 

     Evidently, the previous owners gutted the home before giving up on the renovation project  altogether. The heavily painted moldings that framed the doors were stacked against walls. Others once used to cover gaps in the floorboards and ceilings were removed from their original places and left in the hallway.  The kitchen needed to be rewired, the plumbing had to be fixed. Still, as the couple walked around, they knew they were home.

 

     “We just went and sat in that dining room because there were a couple of chairs in there and we said, ‘This is it,’” Kristin recalled.

 

     That being said, both Bill and Kristin admitted they may have been naive thinking they could do most of the renovations themselves, given the condition of the house. They both held full time jobs, Kristin as a home health nurse for the Department of Health and Human Services, and Bill as a career professional in textiles. Bill said work on the house, on top of everything else, ended up being a test of their endurance.

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     “You never know what you are getting into. But we went through five years of tough, tough work,” he said.

 

     Bill said he and Kristin had plenty of experience with painting and wallpapering, but the project was daunting. The molding had a century of paint and varnish on them that needed to be stripped. The floors, upstairs and downstairs, had to be sanded and revarnished. The stairs themselves had to be restored, and a few missing doors had to be replaced.

 

     To keep in character with the home, much of the original parts of the house were refinished and put back in place. They even kept one of the original plaster walls made of horsehair, lime and mud. The others, Kristin said, turned to dust and were already removed before they bought the home.

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     If something had to be replaced, the couple found period pieces that were removed from other old buildings and homes in the area. Case in point: the kitchen countertops, which Kristin said were in bad shape, were replaced with marble salvaged from the old Andrews Building  — now demolished — in downtown Spartanburg.

 

     All the exterior doors were salvaged but the spindles and railings — a highlight of the home when it was built 145 years ago — were missing. So, the entire porch was open until the Taylors were able to replace them, bringing back the country Victorian charm of the early days.

 

     Many of the projects inside and out were done with the help of friends, neighbors and a litany of contracted professionals whom the couple became friendly with during the renovations.

 

     "We had the good fortune of living next door to a cabinet maker with a shop and he had a lot of stuff,” Bill said. “He did wonderful work. So the house is really better than when it was when it was built in the late 1880s. It’s been restored, enhanced and everything we’ve done has been as much as possible true to the character of the house.”

 

     Upon entering the doors of the century-old home, visitors are greeted by a spacious central hall, where two mahogany-stained columns create a formal entranceway. Six rooms are located downstairs, including a living room, kitchen, den, reading area and bathroom. Upstairs, there are two bedrooms and a bath.

 

     Even the provincial style decor in the home is fitting for a pair who appreciate art and unique, handmade pieces. Each room holds stories of people and places that the Taylors have come across over the years, arranged in a way that the house itself remains the focal point. 

 

     By 2000, the couple expanded their efforts for being stewards of the old neighborhood by buying three homes that bordered their own property when they became available. One of those had belonged to their cabinetmaker friend, who passed away in the early 2000s. Kristin said she and her husband felt an obligation to maintain the integrity of the Glendale Shoals community. It also afforded them additional privacy on their quiet street.

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     “We wanted to protect the history and the character of the neighborhood,” Kristin said.

 

     Their first purchase was the little coffee-colored house across the street, which has a backyard that runs all the way down to an overlook of the river. They did whatever repairs were needed to the 1920s home, using it for visiting family and friends and renting it out from time to time.

 

     Kristin, always keeping an eye out for period pieces to enhance what is there or replace what is broken, needed a new door for the home. As she was driving by a construction site in  Spartanburg one day, she noticed a door in the yard that appeared to be discarded. When she passed by it a second time, she saw its beautiful stained glass, woodwork and a doorbell knob that visitors would have to twist to announce their arrival. Just like the day she saw her Glendale house, she knew she had found the right door for her little house.

 

     Luckily, the workers on the site had no plans to reinstall it, so Kristin squeezed the heavy piece into her tiny Volvo wagon and drove off with the doorbell chiming all the way home. The find was the final touch for their “Falls Cottage,” a name they gave the house to capture the scenic Lawsons Fork Creek cascading behind the home. Shortly after that purchase and renovations, the Taylor’s next door neighbor, who had helped them with their cabinetry and became a close friend, died. The Taylors eventually purchased his home, leaving it as it was when he lived there.

 

     Later, the couple added another home to their expanding property just a short walk from their front porch that had been condemned and left abandoned. The home was quickly restored and sits as a reminder of what a labor of love can accomplish.

 

     Of course, more property required more renovations but the couple at least felt somewhat skilled at what needed to be done when they acquired three additional homes. Kristin said they bought a busload of door moldings, clapboards and corner pieces that were divided among the four houses and eventually installed.

 

     They also now owned approximately 5 acres, which needed regular upkeep and landscaping. It was the price they were willing to pay to maintain the history and integrity of their street

 

     “I felt all along that we belonged to this property. It’s just a trick of paper to say that the property belongs to you,” Bill said. “We’re short-lived creatures and for right now we’re sort of stewards, not gatekeepers.”

 

     The Taylor’s house saw the rise and fall of the mill community but stands as solidly as it did when it was built almost a century and a half ago. In a book called Glendale A Pictorial History by Michael Hembree and Paul Crocker — which Kristin often references — there is a picture of the Taylor’s home when it was occupied by the J.C. LeMaster family in the early 1900s. Next to that photo is another more recent one taken in the early to mid-1990s, when the Taylor’s completed renovations.

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     Having done her own research, Kristin found that her home was built by James Weathers somewhere around the 1880s, but he became ill and died before ever getting a chance to live in it. The property was then purchased by LeMaster, who was a magistrate in Glendale, in 1911. The house had other owners over the decades and was vacant a few years before she and her husband purchased it.

 

     Looking at before and after images, especially during the period when the house was vacant, the yard was nothing like it is today. It was sparse with just a few plantings and a couple of evergreens. However, the Taylors couldn’t begin landscaping until most of the renovations were completed. When that finally ended, the couple could turn their attention to the yard. One thing they knew they needed asap was some privacy. So, they set out to work on that immediately, while looking for inspiration as to the other types of trees and shrubs they would plant.

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     “The first thing we did was put those hollies in. Those little, tiny hollies that are now huge,” Kristin said.

 

     From that point on, the couple’s main goal was to have colorful foliage in the fall, and what better tree to accomplish this than with maple trees? — Specifically, Japanese Maples, which Bill took a keen interest in through his research. 

 

     He became well informed on the do’s and don’ts of the Japanese Maples, reading books on the subject by well respected authorities such as entomologist J.D. Vertree. The couple visited garden centers across the country and spoke with experts before eventually starting the planting process with one main objective: to fill the space with color.

 

     “Our orientation was color,” Bill said.

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     On a trip to Oregon one year, Bill tagged a truckload full of Japanese Maples and had them shipped to the house where they were planted in the front, side, and back of their home. By the time the couple was finished with their selections, there were approximately 120 Japanese Maples planted “easily,” Bill said. In addition, they put in 30 of the weeping variety that now dot the landscape.

 

     “I was such a collector,” Bill admitted. “I was in my 30s and I was doing stuff on a large scale. If I were designing a garden for myself now, I would have a courtyard garden … maybe one weeper, a little fountain.”

 

     But as he walked in almost reverence through the garden, he would stop and comment on the ones growing outside his home, the need for pruning here and there, the look of the leaves and the bones of the trees. Across the road, at the Falls Cottage, a half a dozen oak trees are lined up in a row, still in containers and ready for planting on an empty lot beside the  mid-century house they saved from condemnation. Bill lost count of the other types of vegetation he and Kristin have planted but the numbers are also in the hundreds.

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Boulders dating back 600 million years in the Precambrian age were also added to the landscape, most having come from an area near Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina and weighing at least four tons each. Bill said he wanted to create the illusion of an ancient garden and purchased the stones to help with that effect..

 

     “I had them brought in on a flatbed truck,” he said. “So, you’re building a geological feature. That’s sort of the fantasy.”

 

     One of the latest projects on Bill’s “to do” list is the laying down of huge granite slabs behind the cottage to use as steps leading to a flat patch of land overlooking Lawsons Fork Creek. There, the couple built a stone fire pit for evening gatherings with friends.

 

     A couple of statuettes and sitting areas were created throughout the garden that fit the theme Bill had in mind. Close to one of them was a dwarf Japanese Maple that Bill grew from a cutting the couple found in their yard. Though green at the time, the leaves started offering a hint of what was about to come in the fall. A very brilliant star-like shaped leaf in yellows and oranges. It was a Kristin’s Star — an original.

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     “This is a bush dwarf. It is the original Kristin’s Star,” Bill said. “It has always been here but it wasn’t recognized. I mean, it was just a small, little plant and then we just watched it grow.”

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     Bill said Japanese maples are genetically unstable and so there are many mutations of the tree but for some of them the leaves are so delicate they won’t survive on their own root, requiring grafting to a stronger under stock to survive.

 

     It takes about five years before the tree starts taking on a color and leaf size. Kristin’s Star was a mutation from a seedling that appeared in the hedge by the road and has been a strong variety among the Japanese Maple.

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     Kristin was the one who noticed the different color pattern on a tree in her yard and called Bill over to see what she discovered.

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     “I was over near the holly hedge near the big curve, weeding and I saw this little maple and it was shrimpy colored when the other ones we had had already turned green,” Kristin said. “Bill came out and said, ‘well, I’m going to dig it up and replant it somewhere.’ So he took it across the street and planted it. It’s been over there and we were just kind of watching it and thought, well, this is really different from the others.”

 

     And it was different, so much so that the couple called in Matt and Tim Nichols, owners of the family run nursery in Hendersonville, NC, called Mr. Maple, to get their opinion. After, taking cuttings from the tree and growing it without much effort, the online nursery launched the new variety now officially called Kristin’s Star, which has been a popular seller for several years.

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     “They were the first ones that took the seedling that we have called Kristin’s Star and they were the ones to say it was very popular and sending me pictures with folks who were growing it now in the state of New York, Illinois, Oregon and elsewhere,” Bill said. 

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     More recently, Proven Winners, a plant breeders’ network, will showcase Kristin’s Star in its 2027 catalogue, Bill said.

 

     As the couple sat in their backyard with the sounds of a pond competing with the more distant sound of the river, the oasis the Taylors had hoped to achieve obviously came to fruition on their quiet street in Glendale. They often relax in each other’s company, talking about the different kinds of spiders they noticed making webs between trees or the praying mantis they came across on a walk. Though Bill said they are complete opposites in some ways, they compliment each other most of the time with a similar desire to be at peace in their surroundings and in nature.

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     Recently, they opened up their home and their yard to friends, hosting an evening garden party outdoors. As people meandered through the canopy of trees, the sound of guitars and fiddles could be heard playing as the musicians performed in the little cottage. In the background, the  Lawson Fork Creek rippled in unison.

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     “Poetry and music are important parts of my life, and so much surprising beauty, music, and poetry arise from these singing shoals, inspiring me every day,” Bill said, looking over the acreage of trees and land he and his wife maintain for history’s sake. “I feel sometimes if you lived long enough, you make decisions based on certain types of logic. There’s like a serendipity, a deeper meta narrative going on here. I really assume all this work we have done is for the people who come after us.“