Home is a wetland refuge for the whole family

To out-of-towners, Goshen is part of northern Indiana. To local residents, it's Amish Country. And for Ted and Sherry Bell, it's been home since 1996 and a haven for their children and grandchildren, especially in the summer.

The Bells had owned 5 acres in Goshen for 23 years, but couldn't develop it right away because of wetlands on the property. "When we first came here it was a swamp," says Sherry. "We had a trailer where the house is now." The Bells dug two ponds to begin stabilizing the soil, a process that took about 16 years. "There were no trees whatsoever," she says. "The ground could not support anything. Once we were able to start planting, it was almost five years before there was any growth."

Ted and Sherry picked the highest spot on the land to build their 2,000-square-foot home, which is a customized version of a log home plan. Amish carpenters helped, but the couple did most of the work themselves.

Ted built a bridge over one pond and a pier for fishing. According to Sherry, the ponds have an abundance of catfish, bass, bluegills, and crappie. "We never knew we had crappie," she says, "until one day Ted caught one that they say is really large for this area." He mounted the prize catch on the wall of the family room.

Flower power

Before moving to Goshen, the Bells lived in Rensselaer, Indiana, for 10 years. "All of our family is in this area and we wanted to be close to them," says Sherry, who describes herself as a town girl who became a country girl. "What's so funny about the whole thing is that I never liked the outdoors," she says. "Now, in the summertime, I'm outside at the break of dawn and don't come in until nightfall. It's therapeutic -- I get so much energy from the sun and water."

No longer a neophyte, Sherry handles all the outside maintenance, including mowing the grass, pruning trees and hedges, mulching, and weeding. She has planted a wide variety of flowers including hollyhocks, lupines, roses, violets, pansies, daylilies, chrysanthemums, crocuses, daffodils, and white lilacs. There is a birch tree, a pear tree, three golden weeping willows, and red-twig flowering dogwoods. Near the deck and gazebo that Ted and Sherry built three years ago is a forsythia shrub that produces yellow flowers followed by green leaves in early spring. Ornamental grasses form graceful borders around the ponds.

The landscape design borrows from the Chinese concept of chi, a natural force similar to wind and water. A gentle flow of chi is thought to bring good spiritual, psychological, and physical health. Sherry points out that nothing is square or angular; instead, there are open areas, curves, and irregular borders around flower beds.

Bird's eye view

Enhancing the positive chi is a multitude of birds that flock to the Bell property for food and shelter. Among them are hummingbirds, chickadees, cardinals, blue jays, bluebirds, black-eyed juncos, orioles, red-headed woodpeckers, and mourning doves, whose plaintive call can be heard after dark. Bluebirds are difficult to lure, she notes: "You have to be meticulous about cleaning their nest boxes. But oddly enough, their favorite box is the one that's hardest to clean."

The Bells didn't have many neighbors when they first moved in. "Deer used to come right up to the house, and we could hear whippoorwills in the evening," Sherry says. One day, not long after the house was completed, Sherry investigated an odd flapping noise that turned out to be two large snapping turtles mating. The deer sightings have decreased now that there are homes on either side and across the street, but white egrets, cranes, Canadian geese, and wood ducks still visit the pond.

A hummingbird feeder in the gazebo provides many opportunities to observe the tiny creatures. "They'll come right up to us and just hover," says Sherry. "It's scary until you get used to them." Many of the same plants that attract hummingbirds also bring hummingbird moths, exotic-looking insects with striped wings that are the size of huge bumblebees.

One of Ted and Sherry's favorite spots inside the house is the breakfast nook facing the backyard, because there's always something to watch. Sherry says the winter scenery is reminiscent of a postcard photo. As spring approaches and the crocuses and lilacs begin to bloom, swarms of butterflies descend and chickadees perch on the feeder just outside the window.

Ted, who operates an extruding machine at a factory that makes plastic moldings and other interior trim, works 12-hour days, three on and three off. At the end of a long shift, he and Sherry like to amble around their property and admire the beauty they helped to create. On cool nights, they light a chimenea and sit on a swing inside the gazebo. Crickets, grasshoppers, and katydids supply the soundtrack at dusk during the summer.

Best of all, summer days are filled with the shouts and laughter of children as they swim, fish, and otherwise enjoy the fruits of Ted and Sherry's labor.