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Old Town homeowner revives garden

Sitting on the porch one January afternoon overlooking his front yard and and beyond it, Hanover Square, Will Pittenger was driving himself crazy.

“I can hardly look at this right now. Everything was hit hard by the freeze,” he says, surveying what come June and July will be a lush cornucopia of color and botanical life.

Pittenger’s small front yard and garden around back are his babies. He spends countless hours tending to every flower, shrub, and tree so that each thrives and blooms and grows exactly as God intended them.

But this afternoon was a cool one in January, just a few weeks removed from one of the hardest freezes seen in decades in the Golden Isles. Temperatures dipped into the high teens overnight and despite his best efforts, Pittenger lost some plants he had hoped to keep.

back with some judicious pruning and water in the spring. The Bougainvillea peppered throughout the front landscape, for example, will be just fine.

“I’ll just cut those down to almost nothing, and they will love it,” Pittenger says. “They’ll come back and say ‘thank you.’”

To look at his yard in full bloom, you wouldn’t know that Pittenger considers himself a novice gardener. Talk to the clients he works for tending their yards and gardens and you won’t find one who would agree with him.

Pittenger, though, admittedly is a self-taught gardener who came by his knowledge and ability out of necessity. In the early 1970s, freshly married to his first wife, Pittenger needed a job after a move from Southern California to Boise, Idaho.

“We were young and irresponsible,” he says of living wild and free at the time.

He went to a hotel in search of a dishwashing job and came away from it with groundskeeping gig.

“They said, ‘you know, what we really need is a gardener,’” he says. “I didn’t know a thing about growing plants, but I thought it was interesting.”

His aptitude for it showed immediately. The owner of the hotel asked Pittenger to come tend his yard and soon he had discovered he liked the gig. When reality hit the next year, the couple moved back to Southern California, where Pittenger had grown up. He found his next landscape-related job, and this one would shape the rest of his life.

Pittenger began working with a tree-trimming business and fell in love with being outside, climbing, pruning, and making trees look good and grow well. Suddenly, the man who left University of Southern California with just one semester to go, began taking night classes in subjects like landscape design, plant identification, disease, and pest control — and his favorite, arboriculture.

“My mom said if I didn’t go to college, I’d end up digging ditches,” he says. “I showed her, I’m digging holes.”

After a few years in the tree business in California and decades in Boulder, Colorado, Pittenger hung up his tree climbing gear in 2015 and settled in downtown Brunswick. He still loved making things grow and found the perfect place to do it.

“It’s so much like Southern California here climate-wise, but there is so much more you can grow here because it’s pretty much tropical,” Pittenger says.

Palms, colorful perennials, splashy annuals, and hearty shrubbery are plentiful and grow well in the Golden Isles. Four years of working with a Sea Island landscape crew and countless trips and questions asked at ACE Garden Center on St. Simons Island have turned Pittenger into an “expert novice.” He may be humble and think he’s still a beginner, but everyone else knows better.

It helps that he had the perfect canvas on which to paint with his self-taught horticultural mastery. Pittenger bought the house at 1028 Richmond Street in 2014 after it had been renovated back to its former glory. The home’s distinctive turret and blue-stained windows make it a can’t-miss feature of historic Old Town Brunswick.

The house was built in 1902 by architect John A. Wood and was originally on Norwich Street at its intersection with M Street. It was moved by owner Linda Combs in 1992 to its current location on Hanover Square after the original home there burned.

Inlaid wood designs in the ceilings, original fireplaces, heart pine floors, original pocket doors, and a stunning staircase, as well as other historical features, adorn the house and give it a distinctive charm in a class all its own.

Wood was a famous architect who had a hand in the design of the Oglethorpe Hotel that once stood in downtown Brunswick as well as other hotels and municipal buildings in Tampa, Florida, and at Vassar College.

For Pittenger, the house offers plenty of space and windows where he keeps still more plants in containers to liven up the interior.

“We found this place, and it had been on the market for a year and a half,” Pittenger says of his move to Brunswick with his wife at the time.

“This just matched everything we wanted, and especially being on Hanover Square, it was great. All the appliances were brand new. I’d never lived in a house with brand new appliances.”

Don’t be surprised to see Pittenger either working in his yard, or enjoying the view over Hanover Square from his front porch in the spring and summer.

Ask Crawford Perkins how he and his partner in 4/4 time got the bright idea to call their ‘80s rock band Squirt Gun. Go ahead.

We dare ya.

“We wanted it to be something suggestive and something from the ‘80s,” the band co-founder recalls.

A few profanity-laden monikers were batted about, but eventually, Squirt Gun co-founder Dan Vashaw nailed their catchy band handle.

“I was just driving down the road and I started saying names out loud,” says Dan, the band’s bassist. “And it hit me and I said, ‘Squirt Gun.’ Well, yeah, that works.”