Outdoor Furniture, Patio Furniture and more!

Have you ever heard that saying, “Good things come to those who wait”? Or how about, “Patience is the companion of wisdom”? It’s true, patience does bring good things.  And, as you know, we’ve been talking up the coming Derek Fell Collection for awhile now.

Our dedicated readers may remember his February post announcing the collection and then a following April post about his upcoming collection.  So, it’s been nearly a half a year coming, but we have finally arrived at the eagerly awaited release of the first ever line of outdoor structures from one of the world’s most prolific garden experts! No seriously, go check it out now and tell your friends: DerekFellCollection.com

Derek Fell is a writer and photographer with art, travel and garden books totaling more than 2.5 million in print, plus a photo library numbering more than l50,000 images portraying plants, gardens and travel destinations. As an active and award winning member of both the Garden Writers Association of America and the Society of American Travel Writers, Derek Fell has won more awards from the Garden Writers Association of America than any other garden writer. Derek was born and educated in England, and has traveled widely throughout North America, Europe, Africa, South America, New Zealand and Japan to become a world-wide gardening expert.  As a highly sought contributor for Home and Garden Television, The Outdoor Living Channel, and PBS, Derek also writes for Architectural Digest, Veranda, Royal Horticultural Society Magazine, Garden Design, Hemispheres, American Nurseryman and countless other publications.  He served as a garden design consultant for the White House Gardens as well as several luxury tourist destinations.

Author of over 60 books, his main focus has always been recreating the breathtaking landscapes portrayed in Impressionist art.  Derek has looked at impressionist gardens holistically through his books, The Impressionist Garden and Impressionist Roses, but has also narrowed his scope to specific painters in Cezanne’s Garden, Secrets of Monet’s Garden, Van Gogh’s Gardens and Renoir’s Garden.  Derek believes in bringing art to life, and just as Claude Monet planted his garden to paint, Derek has planted his garden to write about and photograph.   He lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, at the historic Cedaridge Farm, where he cultivates the 24 sloping acres into an award-winning garden of flowers, fruits, and vegetables.

Serving as a thought leader and expert writer on the design, creation, and maintenance of Impressionist gardens for decades, Derek is now spreading his passion through his first line of garden furniture and structures, The Derek Fell Collections.  All inspired by original Impressionist paintings or the structures used in their restored gardens, Derek Fell’s designs will transform your garden into a valued work of art.

So, exciting, right?!

Want to see them?  More than that… want to see them and read what the designer himself has to say about them?

(I do)

Monet’s Bridge with Arched Wisteria Canopy. Claude Monet was one of the founders of the Impressionist movement and when his paintings began to sell to American art collectors, he purchased a house with five acres to create what he called his greatest work of art: his garden at Giverny. The garden was deeded to the state after the death of his son Michel, and restored in 1970 mostly by a donation from the Readers Digest Foundation and other American art benefactors. His famous arched bridge with wisteria canopy is probably the most recognizable garden feature in the world. It has been copied by many gardens. In New Zealand I saw one garden with no less than three Monet bridges connected by paths that wound their way through colonies of azaleas.

Many of the ‘Monet’ bridges featured the arched bridge painted green, but fail to include the wisteria canopy that arches over the span. My design is a scaled-down replica complete with wisteria canopy. This design features a curved canopy that follows the lines of the bridge. In addition to wisteria, the canopy will support climbing roses, silver fleece vine, trumpet vine, climbing hydrangea and other tall climbing plants Monet admired.

Renoir’s Three compartment Compost Bin. Renoir’s home and garden near Nice had goats, chickens and rabbits as well as a large vegetable garden fed by compost. Its most impressive planting is an orchard of 500-year old olive trees. He spent winters there and summers in Paris, erecting an outdoor studio with walls of glass so he could paint the garden in all weather, even seating nudes outside while he sat cool and shaded under cover. There are probably a dozen compost bins on the market, but they don’t hold much compost. I call them ‘toys’ as they fill up so soon and take so long to decompose the contents. My three compartment compost bin is a slightly scaled down version of Renoir’s, allowing for the storage of finished compost, compost in the process of decomposition and a new pile. All the compartments are accessible by removable slats. The air spaces between the slats provide aeration and rapid decomposition.

Japanese Bridge with Horizontal Wisteria Canopy. Monet’s inspiration for his arched bridge with arched wisteria canopy was a Japanese woodblock print. In Japan many of the canopied bridges have a flat span rather than arched, so I decided to offer a flat canopy as a second choice at a slight savings in cost. For a particularly beautiful display, plant blue and white wisteria so their colors mingle, as Monet did.

Monet’s Bench. Monet’s Garden features three distinctive curved benches. He did not design these himself, but saw one in the grounds of Versailles Palace where he went to paint. Years later, when he acquired his Giverny property, he had the Versailles carpenters make identical benches. The original is wide enough to seat six people, but my design is available in several sizes, including a two-seater.

Cezanne’s Trail Bridge. Cezanne’s garden is on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. Just a half acre in extend, it descends a slope overlooking the city. A naturalistic woodland garden, Cezanne disliked formality and any signs of human intrusion on the landscape. His garden, therefore, is extremely natural, with zig-zag trails threading through avenues of mockorange and pines, wild rosemary and fig almost invading the windows of the studio. This bridge design emulates a bridge in Cezanne’s Garden that crosses a narrow stream. The random-width flat span has a rustic appearance, ideal for an informal garden or along a nature trail.

Renoir’s Arbor. Renoir loved to paint mothers and their children sitting in intimate garden spaces like a balcony or a gazebo. This type of arbor can create a transition between two garden spaces or announce the entrance to a garden, allowing vines to carry color high overhead and create what the Impressionist painters called a lace curtain effect, especially from white flowers like white climbing roses and white wisteria.

Van Gogh’s Zig Zag Bridge. Many people do not realize what a keen gardener Vincent van Gogh really was. His father always had a large vicarage garden with fruit trees and vegetable plots, and when he was an art dealer in London he cultivated a cottage-style garden at the back of his lodgings, planting potatoes, poppies and sweet peas. Van Gogh also painted a lot of gardens and he corresponded frequently with his youngest sister who was a garden writer, not only suggesting color harmonies for her to plant, but also naming the plants for her to grow. Japanese art and garden design greatly influenced the Impressionist painters. Van Gogh painted and sketched wooden slab bridges in the fenlands of Holland and in the orchards of Provence. He also collected Japanese woodblock prints. The zig-zag bridge is a classic Japanese design, used to cross low depressions or streams and ponds. In Japanese mythology evil spirits could only travel in straight lines and so entering a garden by means of a zig-zag bridge provided a sense of peace and seclusion.

Have Fun!

Hazel

Tags: Derek Fell, Garden Bridges, impressionism, impressionist furniture, Impressionist Gardens, impressionist structures

Derek Fell is a writer and photographer with art, travel and garden books totaling more than 2.5 million in print, plus a photo library numbering more than l50,000 images portraying plants, gardens and travel destinations.  His work in Architectural Digest and Veranda has won several writing and photography awards.

This celebrity of the Garden Design world will be releasing his very own line of outdoor furniture and garden structures inspired by the impressionist gardens of which he is the absolute authority.   Working exclusively with CedarStore.com, Derek Fell speaks about his newest designs here at the All Outdoor Patio Furniture Blog.

The Famous Garden Book Author Explains the Inspiration behind the Cedar Store’s Latest Design Series

For more than 45 years I have specialized in documenting gardens worldwide and writing about garden design. Many of my books deal with garden furniture and garden structures and these are well known to landscape professionals such as certified landscape architects and garden designers. These include ‘Garden Accents’ (Henry Holt), ‘The Encyclopedia of Garden Design and Structures’ (Firefly),  ‘550 Home Landscaping Ideas.’ (Simon & Schuster) and others.

My most successful series of garden books focuses on the great French Impressionist painters and their restored gardens, including Renoir, Monet, Cezanne and Van Gogh. More than 50 of my garden features have been published in Architectural Digest magazine, not only outstanding gardens in North America, but also foreign destinations like Scotland, England, Wales, France, New Zealand, Japan, Morocco, South Africa, Hawaii, Bermuda and the Bahamas.

During these travels I have documented some of the world’s outstanding examples of garden design and garden structures, adapting the best to my own two gardens, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and Sanibel Island, Florida, and also private commissions. I greatly value the opportunity to work with the Cedar Store on a special series of garden structures inspired by the Impressionists. The Cedar Store is pre-eminent in the field of garden structures, including custom-design. In the months ahead I will introduce the following distinctive pieces:

Monet’s Bridge with Wisteria Canopy. Monet’s arched Japanese footbridge and wisteria canopy must be the world’s most recognizable garden structure. Spanning a corner of his pond at Giverny, France, the bridge was originally painted white to reflect the changing colors or sunrises and sunsets, but later Monet painted it apple green to harmonize with other garden structures such as his gates, benches and the shutters of his house. It has been replicated in many famous gardens worldwide, including the Grounds for Sculpture Garden, Hamilton, New Jersey.  Many ‘Monet’ bridges do not feature the wisteria canopy, but I feel this is what makes the Monet bridge so unique and so romantic. In addition to a calendar titled ‘Monet’s Garden’, I have also authored ‘Secrets of Monet’s Garden’ (Friedman/Fairfax) and ‘The Magic of Monet’s Garden’ (Firefly).

Monet’s Bench. For its size, Monet’s garden at Giverny is the most visited garden in Europe. It is filled with benches because Monet had a large family – two sons of his own, five step-daughters and a step-son, and they would often hold family gatherings in the garden. The most distinctive Monet bench is a six-seater with a curved backrest he saw at Versailles Palace when he went there to paint. Later, he had the Versailles carpenters construct three benches for his garden. The original Versailles bench is unpainted, but Monet painted his apple green to match other structures in his garden. My Monet Bench can be supplied as a six seater, but also as a two-seater or a four seater, since not everyone has a garden space large enough to accommodate a six-seater bench.

Cezanne’s Trail Bridge. Cezanne and Monet were good friends, and they both enjoyed gardening. Cezanne painted the countryside around his home at Aix-en-Provence, and eventually built a special studio with a walled garden within view of his favorite motif, the mountain of Saint Victoire. My design is based on a bridge that spanned a narrow stream bordering Cezanne’s Garden when I first visited there in 1990. He liked all things natural, and his garden is mostly a woodland garden threaded with rustic trails that descend a slope. This bridge is perfect for any situation where a simple, rustic design is needed along a woodland path or as part of a bog garden. My book, ‘Cezanne’s Garden’ (Simon & Schuster) is sold at the garden and helped the garden increase its attendance from 5,000 visitors a year to 100,000 a year.

Van Gogh’s Zig-Zag Bridge. Born in Holland, Vincent van Gogh fell under the spell of the Impressionist painters when he moved to Paris in search of artistic development. He loved to paint bridges, the most famous of which is the Langoise drawbridge near Arles, in the south of France. But also simply slab bridges to cross narrow streams. In addition to the Impressionists, Van Gogh was greatly influenced by Japanese silk screen artists, and this Japanese slab bridge is similar to ones pictured in his collection. Both Japanese and Chinese garden owners valued gardens as a sanctuary, and the purpose of the zig-zag design is to keep evil spirits from the garden. In Japanese and Chinese mythology, evil spirits can travel only in straight lines. The beauty of the zig-zag bridge is that it can be added to in segments so that  many more sections can be added to create a longer span. My book, ‘Van Gogh’s Gardens’ (Simon & Schuster) won three awards from the Garden Writers Association, including Best Book, Best Photography and Best Writing.

Renoir’s 3-Compartment Compost Bin. Renoir’s restored garden is in the south of France, near Nice, and when I first visited the garden as a guest of the French Tourist Office in 1989, I was impressed with two features – the enormous age of his olive trees (some 500 years old) and the size of Renoir’s compost pile. Even the skins from his grapes and the manure from his goats were delegated to his compost piles. He was a great believer in organic gardening, and his grandson told me how he preferred to grow pole snap beans rather than bush snap beans because of their greater vine coverage resulted in a more flavorful bean. Monet and Cezanne visited Renoir and had many discussions about art and gardening.

Caillebotte’s Driveway Gate. Gustave Caillebotte was born into a wealthy French family, and after his parents died he established a beautiful home and garden along the banks of the River Seine at Petit Gennevilliers, west of Paris. He not only collected Impressionist art, buying paintings from Renoir, Monet and Cezanne when they were struggling artists, he also was an accomplished Impressionist painter in his own right. He is famous for painting exaggerated lines of perspective, as in his ‘Paris Street Scene on a Rainy Day’.  Caillebotte’s gate – with its distinctive criss-cross design – not only served as the entrance to his driveway but also the entrance to his garden. Monet was greatly influenced by Caillebotte’s garden, and a similar criss-cross pattern can be seen today in the entrance gates to Monet’s water garden.

The foregoing is a sampling of the designs in my Impressionist Collection. I always think that when you add a structure to a garden it must serve two purposes – a decorative accent that’s a pleasure to look at, and functional. When you can add a third element – a ‘talking point’ I don’t think one could ask for more of a bridge, bench or gate.

Stay tuned on our blog, by following us on twitter, or becoming our friend on facebook to keep up to date on the release of CedarStore.com’s new design series by Derek Fell.

Tags: Cezanne's Garden, compost bin, Derek Fell, garden bench, Garden Bridges, Impressionist Gardens, Monet's Gardens, Van Gogh's Garden's