Blue Ridge Living
A farmer’s daughter makes a home in horse country.
“Someone may see beauty in a rock,” says Tom Massie, “but to me it’s something I have to farm around.”
His daughter, Aney Melissa Hoehn, sees beauty in rock. The slope behind the home she lives in with her husband Dave, a software engineer, is full of rock. She’s terraced, built steps and retaining walls and planted, and planted and planted.
“Dave and I picked this spot years and years before we moved here,” says Aney. That spot is 60 acres of land on a Rappahannock County, Va. farm, which Tom Massie inherited from his father and grandfather in 1963. “My dad thought it was a terrible idea – we should build on the top of a hill, ‘you’re never going to be able to reclaim it from the poison ivy.’”
