Avant Gardens
by Derek Fell
When I purchased historic Cedaridge Farm in Tinicum Township it consisted of 20 acres with a farmhouse, a guest cottage and a tenant and not much ornamental plantings except lawns. There were few flowering plants except for some patches of daffodils that needed rigorous thinning, a pair of struggling purple lilacs and no vegetable garden or any sign of where one might have been. Since I had purchased the property to serve as an ‘outdoor studio’— a place to test different gardening techniques and photograph the results for my gardening books and magazine articles, I decided to create a series of theme gardens. The first priority was to tear down an old chicken house in a sunny location and replace it with a vegetable garden where I planted a large patch of asparagus, made raised beds for salad crops and root vegetables, and leveled a site for a melon patch.
Next to the vegetable garden (fenced to keep out deer) I established a fruit tree orchard of mostly apples, pears and peaches, the space outlined with a split rail fence on which to grow grape vines. Of these three popular fruits the peaches proved to be the most productive, requiring the least maintenance.
Since we like to fill the farmhouse with fresh floral bouquets we then established a cutting garden using a gingerbread white gazebo to give it a Victorian appearance and planted mostly spring flowering tulips and hyacinths for early spring bloom, and flowering annuals for a summer-long display including zinnias, cosmos and snapdragons. Today, these flower within square and rectangular beds that create a pleasing formal appearance.
Downhill from the cutting garden we have a toolshed that resembles a small cottage, and this inspired what became our next theme area – a cottage garden. Enclosed with a white picket fence, it features mostly old-fashioned perennials such as daylilies, garden lilies, phlox, and perennial sunflowers augmented by climbing annual morning glories and climbing annual nasturtiums.
A wide lawn vista proved to be the perfect site for some sunny, kidney shaped island beds filled with a mix of hardy perennials such as astilbe and summer flowering bulbs, notably gladiolus and dahlias. Further down the slope, beside a stream, we planted what became a bog garden, with plants like swamp hibiscus and Japanese water irises that like their roots in moisture soil.
The stream cascades over a spillway and enters a woodland which we threaded with paths edged with native wildflowers to create a shaded wildflower garden using white and red trillium, wild blue phlox and white foam flower purchased as ready-to-bloom plants from Bowman’s Hill Wildflower Preserve, south of New Hope. A shade-tolerant fescue path winding through the woodland we planted with mostly foliage plants such as hosta, heuchera and ferns, while a steep lightly-shaded slope rising to our boundary fence became home to a collection of more than 50 varieties of choice daffodils obtained from several leading bulb suppliers. Similarly, on another sloping site we established a collection of garden lilies, which in summer fills the garden with a fragrance reminiscent of gardenias.
At the back of our red barn there used to be a horse paddock, and this became a special water feature consisting of a series of waterfalls and a stream, all the water re-circulated through a filter, so a deep pool serves double duty as a plunge pool and a home for a collection of water lilies. We gave this water feature a Japanese aura by using lots of boulders and placing a Japanese stone lantern as a focal point beside a stone slab bench.
On the other side of the barn is a quaint guest cottage which we turned into another version of an English cottage garden, but with a heavy emphasis on shrub roses and flowering vines growing up trellis, including perennial sweet peas, a trumpet creeper that attracts flocks of hummingbirds, and several kinds of clematis, the best of which are three heirloom varieties – ‘Nelly Moser’ (a pink and white bi-color,) and ‘Jackman,’ and ‘Ernest Markham’ (a red), all of which bloom at the same time as the roses.
A meandering trail connects all of these theme gardens so no matter what time of year, there is rarely a day goes by that I do not walk the circuit with camera in hand to record the ever-changing visual sensations of my 20 theme areas.
Derek Fell (1939-2019) is remembered as one of the world’s best most well-known and respected writers. During a career of more than 50 years as a garden writer, Derek Fell has authored more than a hundred garden books and calendars. He has written the Avant Garden department for Bucks County Magazine for the last seven years.