Creating Ambiance With Gardens

During his 40-year career as a garden writer and photographer, Derek Fell has designed numerous garden spaces, many involving his wife Carolyn. The best example of their work can be seen at their home, historic Cedaridge Farm, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

There, they have designed more than twenty theme areas, including shade gardens, sunny perennial borders, tapestry gardens involving trees and shrubs, a cottage garden, herb garden, cutting garden and an ambitious water garden.

Curb appeal and ambiance are important to brighten up your property or prepare it for sale.

SOME GARDEN TYPES

Water Garden. Water is the music of nature. It can be tricked over stones, cascaded from a great height so its crashes onto rocks. It can fall in a solid sheet or as silver threads. A beautiful water garden with waterfalls and stepping stones can be located in sunlight or shade. It includes a pool for dipping, and it features both a collection of koi and hardy water lilies. A popular water garden design features a koi pool fed by a series of waterfalls, and the water re-circulated through filters to keep the water clear.

Sunny Perennial Border. This can be formal or informal, square, rectangular, round and kidney shaped, in the form of an island bed or backed against a decorative hedge, wall or fence. Plants can be chosen to produce a parade of color through all the seasons, or concentrated for a particular season. Color themes can be poly chromatic like a rainbow, monochromatic (for example all white – perfect for a wedding), or it can feature an Impressionist color harmony. A popular perennial garden design is two parallel border with a grass path leading to a focal point such as a sculpture or gazebo.

Tropical Garden. You do not need to live in a frost-free area to have a beautiful tropical garden. At Cedaridge Farm we have two – one is a tribute to the design philosophy of the late Roberto Burle Marx, who designed dramatic tropical gardens around Rio. It is in a lightly shaded area and features plants that are hardy (like ‘Sum & Substance’ hosta) but look tropical and tender plants that are tender (like banana trees and tree ferns) that either need moving indoors during winter or can be discarded like annuals at the end of the season. Our second tropical space is a patio with tropical plants grown in containers.

Shade Gardens. We design two kinds of shade gardens – one where the plants provide mostly foliage interest (like ferns, hostas, heuchera and hakone grass), and plants that flower well (like impatiens, coleus, and lilies), or a combination of the two.

Woodland Garden. Whether you have existing woodland or you need to create a woodland from scratch, the result can be sensational. Decide whether you want deciduous trees that provide fall color or evergreens that stay green all winter, or a mixture. At Cedaridge we made a ‘cathedral’ garden where the existing trees are trimmed high so the trunks look like the columns of a cathedral, and the branches arch out to meet overhead like the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral.

Vegetable Garden. We can design you an easy-care garden of raised beds where vegetables are planted in blocks or an edible landscape where edibles are grown for ornamental effect.

Herb Garden. The herb garden at Cedaridge Farm is a ‘quadrant design’, feature in numerous calendars and books, including Derek Fell’s ‘Herb Gardening for Beginners.’ We can also provide a cartwheel design or a parterre herb garden for bountiful harvests of fresh herbs. The Herb Garden can also do double-duty as a vegetable garden.

Cutting Garden. The cutting garden at Cedaridge Farm features bulbs such as tulips and daffodils for spring, and ever-blooming annuals to follow the bulbs so armloads of flowers can be harvested from April through October.

Victorian Garden. A garden with romantic overtones! Imagine a white gazebo framed by mostly white flowers for a wedding in the family. Or choose from among several color harmonies, such as yellow and blue, red, pink and silver, or blue, pink and white.

Cottage Garden. You don’t need a cottage to have a cottage garden. But if you do, such as a guest cottage, why not wrap it in shrub roses and climbers, plus those delightful English cottage garden plants like poppies, sunflowers and pinks. We also like to include plants to attract butterflies and hummingbirds.

Orchard. You don’t need a lot of space for a productive orchard. By making the right choices, fruit trees can be grown in containers or espaliered against fences and walls to save space. Peaches and apples can be trained over arbors. Just a few plants of small fruits like strawberries and raspberries can be highly productive.

Japanese Garden. The problem with many Japanese gardens is a tendency to use pseudo-Japanese elements such as Chinese dragons. Derek Fell has twice traveled to Japan, has written award-winning articles about Japanese garden design, and has the experience to design authentic-looking spaces in the Japanese tradition using elements of Zen or Feng Shui, or a combination of the two disciplines to create a magical space.

Italian Garden. Although Italian gardens can be highly ostentatious, requiring steep slopes to achieve the best effect, like the Villa d’Este, near Rome, small spaces can achieve the aura of an Italian garden. Derek Fell has not only visited some of the finest Italian Gardens, such as La Mortola on the Italian coast, and Boboli overlooking Florence, he has toured and photographed the Vatican Gardens.

Monet’s Garden. This beautiful artist’s garden north of Paris contains more than a hundred special planting ideas to create what Monet considered his greatest work of art. Moreover, his planting ideas have undoubtedly inspired more new garden design than any other garden. Monet’s arched bridge, his waterlily pond, his arches leading to the entrance of his house, and his color harmonies are just some examples of Monet’s innovation that people today like to emulate.

Tapestry Garden (Trees & Shrubs). The great French Impressionist artist, Paul Cezanne’s garden, in Provence, is composed mostly of trees and shrubs, not only as a labor saving device, but to provide a tapestry of color from leaf colors, leaf texture and leaf shapes. What could be more appealing than to look out of a window of your home at a rich foliage panorama, including all shades of green from light green to dark-green, plus blue, silver, gold, bronze?

Hillside Garden. Even dry hillsides can make beautiful rock gardens, with paths twisting and turning in a zig-zag to create a visual adventure from the top of the slope to the bottom. They can be terraced and threaded with streams to create waterfalls and planted with some of nature’s most beautiful plant forms. Bridges, benches and belvedere are some of the structural elements that can add interest to a hillside.

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