Garden Structures at Cedaridge Farm

Feb 9th, 2010 by Hazel

Derek Fell is a world renowned garden designer, photographer, and writer. He is the author of The Magic of Monet’s Garden, Renoir’s Garden, and Cezanne’s Garden. His last work is The Encyclopedia of Garden Design (Firefly Books). His garden at historic Cedaridge Farm has won several design awards, including best interpretation of an Impressionist garden, best water garden and best flower garden.

My home and garden, Cedaridge Farm is located on 20 acres of sloping ground in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. When I purchased the property 20 years ago to serve as an outdoor studio for photography and experimenting with various gardening techniques, there was hardly a flower on the property. There were a few outbuildings – a barn, a spring-house and a chicken-house, but no ornamental features. My first project was to start a vegetable garden and experiment with various vertical gardening techniques since I had come to the conclusion that climbing vegetables like pole snap beans instead of bush snap beans and climbing zucchini instead of bush zucchini were more flavorful because of their extra leaf coverage collecting chlorophyll, but also because vining vegetables tend to be ever-bearing, where bush varieties often exhaust themselves after two weeks of production. From this experimentation I designed an easy to install vertical gardening unit called a Skyscraper Garden that the Cedar Store now offers for sale. The Skyscraper Garden consists of a pair of brackets for attaching to a fence or between two posts, a metal cross bar to hang a 4 ft. wide by 6 ft. high section of netting, and three pegs to hold the netting taught to the ground. Up to four vining plants can be grown along the width of the unit, and it is a wonderful space-saving idea for people without a lot of room for a traditional horizontal garden.

Because we are located next to a state park with more than 300 deer we have deer wandering through the property every night looking for food, and so I had to erect a fence around my vegetable garden, but to make it look attractive I used some beautiful cedar gates as entrances, one of them featuring an arch that I covered with grape vines.

My next project was a cutting garden as my wife, Carolyn and I like to fill the rooms of our farmhouse with fragrant, fresh flowers. We chose a level site between the farmhouse and our barn, and to make it decorative we installed a beautiful white Victorian-style gazebo at one end as a focal point. A flagstone path leads from the farmhouse through the cutting garden to the gazebo, with a table and built in benches for sitting with guests.

We have a natural stream at the bottom of the slope, and we made a nature trail that criss-crosses the stream, requiring the installation of several bridges. These are painted barn red to match the color of the barn and also to harmonize with the colors of fall when the deciduous woods turn russet colors.

The styles of the bridges change depending on the location – one is a Monet-style arched bridge, another a flat span connecting to a boardwalk that leads through a swampy area, and another is a rustic design made from two rough wooden slabs and tree branches for hand rails..

Whenever there is a change of environment along the garden path, or at the entrance to a theme garden (such as a cottage garden adjacent to a guest cottage), I have installed wooden arches. These are not only decorative and functional by supporting climbing plants such as trumpet creeper and wisteria, they help to create focal points and direct visitors from one garden space to another.

For the future I will be working with the Cedar Store on a series of classic garden structures that I have admired, largely as a result of writing about the restored gardens of great Impressionist painters, like Renoir, Monet and Cezanne.