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by Lori Rose
It was just over twenty years ago that our own Margo Aramian Ragan visited with young Derek Kehler. He was twenty-three years old at the time, and already an accomplished and award-winning gardener and garden designer, having won first prize for his container gardens in the Bucks Beautiful gardening contest. Derek had been gardening since he was ten years old, learning from his mother Pauline and his grandparents. Studying history in college only deepened his passion for gardening, helping him advance into garden design.
Fast-forwarding to 2020, we reconnected with Derek at his home on River Willow Drive in Furlong. His passion for gardening and garden design, as well as history as shown through antiques and collectibles, is immediately obvious. What we find here is a beautiful, pristine house and immaculate, intricate gardens that create a haven in a suburban development.
The development, Bridge Valley at Furlong, had been a farm, and the original farmhouse can be seen from the back deck. One of Derek’s many visitors was a gentleman who had farmed on the property decades ago, growing tomatoes for Campbell’s Soup. Today, Derek is the proud president of the Bridge Valley Homeowner’s Association. He and Bucks County’s own Renny Reynolds, one of the nation’s most renowned entertainment, gardening and lifestyle experts and co-author of “Chasing Eden – Design Inspirations from the Gardens at Hortulus Farm”, worked together with the extended neighborhood.
Derek and his mother chose the building site for its wide, sweeping expanse of front yard with a southern exposure. “The property is shaped like a piece of pie,” Derek explains, “with the point at the back and the wide edge at front.” Unlike most homes that have one house directly across the street, his property faces four different houses, and the people who live there appreciate his lovely grounds. The builders originally used ash trees along the street – Derek’s property had four of them. All the ash trees in the neighborhood eventually died, the emerald ash borer did not spare any of them. Derek chose to replace them with four different and unique varieties of shade tree. There are more trees up the sides of the house, and one at the point of the property in the back, ringing the house with beauty and diversity. Each individual tree is interesting, with qualities such as unique leaf shape, bark texture or fall color; as a group the trees complement one another across all four seasons. Visiting Master Gardeners remarked that the property is a small arboretum.
Derek chose each tree with care, taking the trees’ light requirements and the house’s windows into account. Each window inside the house frames a different tree, making the gardens part of the house on the inside as well as the outside.
There are conifers, some of which are deciduous (lose their needles in winter)—Cedris atlantica ‘Glauca Aurea’, the Golden Atlas cedar, a deciduous conifer with golden new growth; a deciduous larch that also has golden highlights; Japanese white pine (Pinus parvaflora) with long, soft needles; a graceful and flowing weeping Alaskan cedar; a false cypress (Chamaecyparis) with decorative texture; a dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) with bright green feathery leaves that turn an orangey-red in autumn; and a bristlecone pine (Pinus aristata), an ancient tree that Derek thinks may have been in the Garden of Eden. “We were all supposed to live in a garden. I like to think I’m creating an Eden here,” he says.
There are maple trees—Acer triflorum with shedding bark and unusual leaves with three points, Acer palmatam ‘Bloodgood’ that is regarded as one of the best purple-leaved Japanese maples, and an upright form of Japanese maple called ‘Shishigashira’ with curly green leaves.
And there are distinctive trees— one side of the house is softened by a colonial variety of magnolia tree called ‘Little Gem’ that has thick green leaves with coppery undersides and large fragrant white flowers in spring. In the back is a hawthorn ‘Winter King’. It is a large focal point tree, full of bright orange-red berries in winter. Derek says, “I’ve seen a hundred and fifty robins on this tree on Valentine’s Day. They come back every year. They love it.” Derek’s newest tree is a paw-paw, the largest edible fruit native to America. He is eagerly looking forward to tasting the custardy banana-like fruit, hopefully within the next few years.
The second layer of plantings are shrubs, hand pruned and carefully tended by Derek himself. There is a lovely Weeping Blue Atlas Cedar softening the garage wall, reminiscent of a waterfall, and a topiary trained into perfect balls. The back deck is surrounded by shrubs, including unusual orange deciduous azaleas and a golden gingko shrub variety called ‘Chase Manhattan’. A bright pink, flower-filled crepe myrtle punctuates the front corner of the house. There are Japanese hollies (Ilex crenata) under the front windows. “Believe it or not, the builder planted them and I elaborately sculpted them into the hedges you see over the years,” says Derek. Irish yew (Taxus baccata ‘Fastigiata’) stand sentinel at either side of the front door. Those too were sculpted by Derek.
Derek chose the shrubs and their locations to echo the lines of the house. The trees and shrubs create the “bones” of the gardens and the perfect backdrop for the exuberant display of spring bulbs and summer annuals.
Springtime showcases hundreds of tulips and over two hundred pansies. “For a few years, a man would bring a little girl over to take pictures with the tulips at Easter. I love to share the garden and the entire house,” Derek says. “I enjoy when people come and sit. The yard is not fenced in. There is a bench outside the library window, and sometimes a lovely lady comes and sits. Anyone is welcome.”
Summertime is for annuals. Hundreds of salvia ‘Early Bonfire’ light up the front beds. In back, Derek uses planters of purple ‘Wave’ petunias, pink mandevilla vine, fluffy magenta celosia, and a lovely white caladium (also known as elephant ears) with red and green veins to liven up the deck. He uses many different kinds of containers at various heights in his award-winning designs. There are also cleome (spider flower) and scaevola, both big bold plants in soft shades of pink and lavender. A cylindrical birdhouse, designed by Derek when he was studying for his math SATs and brought to Furlong from his previous home in Warminster, and other whimsical statuary collected by Derek and his Mom Pauline over the years, is artfully placed around the gardens.
Autumn brings mums. Loads of beautiful, colorful mums surround the house and garden beds, along with a creative display of gourds and at least one huge prize-winner pumpkin. “Over the years, gardening extended to seasonal decorating,” Derek explains. He especially loves decorating the gardens in autumn for Halloween. “The children really seem to enjoy it,” he says.
Derek rotates seasonal items systematically, both in the gardens and inside the house. Winter showcases the evergreen shrubs and elegant bones of the gardens, and Derek uses fresh greens to grace the doors and windows outside. He also lights the house, trees and shrubs for an elegant Christmas display. Inside he carefully places Christmas-themed collections, including a remarkable display of Byers’ Choice carolers and beautifully decorated Christmas trees. “The house itself is alive and moving,” he says.
The house is a tribute to his Mom, Pauline Hahn Kehler, who passed away in October 2016. “We were mother and son, but also teacher and apprentice. She was my mentor,” Derek says. Together they enjoyed choosing everything in the house from fixtures to furniture, and he extended the design principles he learned from Pauline out into the gardens.
Derek replaced the builder’s concrete walkway and porch with blue-gray stone in keeping with the elegance of the grand brick Georgian-style colonial house. The style both inside and out is influenced by the traditional American designs of DuPont and Rockefeller, giving it a colonial Williamsburg look, and bringing his passions for history and design together. Buying the house newly built and setting it up from scratch allowed him and his Mom Pauline to create everything exactly as they liked to showcase both Derek’s tree, shrub and plant collections as well as Pauline’s collections of furniture, jugs and (my favorites) German incense smokers—quaint nutcracker-type wooden dolls dressed as bakers, fishermen and chimney sweeps with pipes that let out the smoke from the incense.
The art collection extends into the kitchen, where the backsplash is authentic Mercer tile in a gorgeous shade of rich, shiny brick red. Another lovely surprise in the house is a custom mural painted and framed by Bucks County artist Murrie Gayman. It is a bucolic farm scene made especially for Pauline. “He added our home to the painting,” says Derek. And sure enough, there’s the brick Georgian house on a rolling hillside. “That’s how you know it’s not just wallpaper,” he laughs.
Derek has hosted many gatherings, groups and tours over the years, and his hospitality was recognized when he was given the honor of being a stop on the June 2016 Bucks Beautiful Kitchen and Garden Tour. “Mom was still alive and present at the Bucks Beautiful Tour. It was probably her best day in a long time,” Derek says. She passed away a few months later, on October 23, 2016.
Over the years, Derek has won many gardening awards. In 1996 he entered his Container Gardens in the Bucks Beautiful contest and won third prize, which inspired him to improve his efforts. In 1997 he won the coveted first prize. Fast-forwarding to November 2018, he won the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society Garden of Distinction Award. Derek is humble, “Many different people visited many times before the award was given. They seemed to enjoy the gardens,” he says. “I’m a very fortunate man.”
What words of wisdom does Derek have for fellow gardeners? “Use only the best tools,” he says, and the right tool for the job at hand. He keeps his tools meticulously cleaned and sharpened. He tries to choose plantings that deer and rodents don’t normally like and uses Liquid Fence and Repels-All to keep them away from plants they do like. Derek also leaves the clippings on the ground when he prunes. Then he mulches over top of the clippings, creating a natural fertilizer. “I tend to the entire property myself,” he says, pruning and weeding as needed, and spreading many yards of mulch each year. “The only thing I don’t do myself is the lawn.”
It is obvious that the award-winning gardener Derek Kehler is passionate about garden design and the labor of love that is gardening and sharing that passion with others. “Come and sit,” he offers friends and strangers alike. “I am thrilled to have you.”
Lori Rose, the Midnight Gardener, is a Temple University Certified Master Home Gardener and member of GardenComm: Garden Communicators International. She has gardened since childhood and has been writing about gardening for over twenty years.