WELLESLEY, Mass. — Good fences make good neighbors - or so the poem goes.
Now old stone walls that once formed boundaries throughout New England are being plucked up stone by stone in a weighty harvest of a new cash crop.
Recycling fieldstone borders from old farms or fields for reassembly in suburban yards is a booming business, say masons, who report a growing demand for landscape architecture fashioned from the rocks of antique walls.
In an era of disposable everything, the solid, lichen-covered boundaries immortalized by Robert Frost in his poem ``Mending Wall'' form an appealing link to one of New England's most recognizable physical features.
Homeowners hungry for instant quaint have paid plenty to acquire pieces of historical hardscape.
``You can build a wall today, and tomorrow it will look like it's been there for 300 years,'' says Jon Devine, whose company, Plymouth Quarries, buys old walls from a network of closely guarded sources and resells them to contractors and do-it-yourselfers. Sales of the old stones have grown ``exponentially,'' says Devine, from an estimated 20 tons a summer 10 years ago, to more than 20 tons a week these days.
On a recent day in this affluent college town, mason Nick O'Hara, whose work has been featured on This Old House, eyed fieldstones collected from a century-old wall on an old farm 10 miles west of here. He had them hauled in to build a garden enclosure for a Wellesley house that's just 40 years old.
Known as ``one-man'' stones because a person working alone can lift them, the rocks vary in texture and shape, though most are rounded, and weigh 20 to 75 pounds. They bear witness to why early settlers were so bonded to their land - they practically broke their backs to make it farmable.
The trick to fitting the old stones together without mortar in so-called drystone construction is making them ``nest comfortably,'' says O'Hara, 41, whose keen eye can fall on a pile of rocks and see ``the natural top, bottom, left and right'' of every stone.
``You don't see it right away,'' says the Irishman, ``but after years you get the knack.''
O'Hara supervises the work of mason David Danforth, 38, who, with carbide-tipped chisels and a four-pound sledge, trims a stone occasionally to make it fit. But the secret of a job in which gravity binds the wall is creating natural troughs into which the curves of other stones fit snugly.
