The gardens and woodland are important features of Cedar Chase. We spend a large proportion of the maintenance fees on them, and the Committee works hard to maintain a good standard. Everything on the estate apart from individual back gardens is managed by the Society.
In 2013 the AGM allocated a sum of money to improve and refresh the gardens. We started by surveying the planting around the houses and trying to work out what had been intended by the original designer, Preben Jakobsen. We had some help in this from Jan Woudstra, Reader in Landscape History and Theory at the University of Sheffield, who provided a copy of the original planting plan and wrote a report on the current state of our grounds. Unfortunately Dr Woudstra did not have a copy of the key to the plan, so we spent a lot of time in detective work trying to find out what it meant! A copy of the key was found in our own archives in 2015 and we were pleased to see that we had more than half of it right.
- Original planting plan (50MB image file)
- Original planting list and key to the plan
- Our best guess at the Gardening Plan key in 2014
- Jan Woudstra report July 2013
- Photographic survey of formal gardens April 2014
- Cedar Chase Plant Book
- Garden Walkaround notes 8th November 2014
- Proposals for front of 15-17, Nov 2014 and Jan 2015
- Garden Walkaround notes September 2017
The main refresh works started in January 2015 and the estate initially looked rather bare, but the new planting established itself well and was looking good by the end of the summer.
Trees
Cedar Chase has a large number of trees. A few are close to the houses, but most are in the woodland area to the south. We are considering how this area should be managed, so in 2017 we set off to make an inventory which now lists over 120 significant trees.
- Trees Newsletter Article Autumn 2020
- Cedar Chase Tree Inventory June 2017 (spreadsheet)
- Woodlands tree map
- Front of house 14 tree map
- Rear of houses 6-8 tree map
- Tree Survey Report July 2017
- Tree Survey List July 2017
- Cedar trees
- Felling the big stump
- Woodland refresh 2018-2019
Tree Protection Orders
Some of our trees are subject to Tree Protection Orders.
- TPO 1969.03 EDC – this covers several large trees near the houses, plus most of the lower grounds as an ‘area’. The individually-named trees have now all died.
- TPO 2002.33 – this covers the Caucasian Wingnut trees beside #8
- TPO 2005.12 – this covers the lime tree in #1’s back garden
- TPO 2005.19 – this covers several large trees in the Old Rectory adjacent to #14’s back garden