Text: Alice Welsh Doyle
Photography: Jean Allsopp
Rebecca Hawkins, an interior decorator in Birmingham, Alabama, passed by a large, undeveloped natural area on her way to carpool near her youngest child’s elementary school every day. She became intrigued because it was a rare sighting in a coveted, but almost completely developed neighborhood. She and her husband did some digging and were rewarded with a phone number. After a year of cajoling the eccentric homeowner, the lot was theirs…