Cedarburg couple is restoring their 30-acre property with original homesteader's descendant

Tom and Susan Felmer’s town of Cedarburg gardens span 30 acres on two properties, with a history that stretches back over 175 years.

It’s a space the two are lovingly restoring with the help of Lynn Campbell Hertel, an estate gardener who is a descendant of the land's original homesteaders — her great-great-great-grandparents William and Ellen Hemlock, who bought the property in 1846 after immigrating from Kinsale, Ireland.

The Felmers call their story serendipitous.

It started in 1999 when they bought eight acres of land, built a home on it and created gardens.

In 2009 the farmhouse and land next door — complete with a barn, summer kitchen, artesian well and two ponds — went up for sale and they bought that property, too.

“We didn’t want the house, we wanted the property, but we gained the farmhouse in the bargain,” Susan said.

For about eight years they worked on the land and rented the farmhouse to various relatives and friends of friends.

“When we bought it, the land wasn’t maintained. There were lots of invasives, and it was very overgrown,” Tom said.

Around the same time the couple, who are both retired, also began updating the farmhouse where their son and his family now live.

Then in 2013 Hertel reached out.

“I called them because I wanted to know more about my dad’s grandma. I was researching my family tree. I wanted to know if they had any pictures,” Hertel said.

“I called her back and said, come over. She was an estate gardener and we got to talking. We had both studied horticulture,” Susan said.

The couple hired Hertel to work with them on their land and soon the two women were hip-deep in a restoration project that is still going on today.

“It took us the first six years to work from the front to the back of the house,” Susan said, noting that Hertel comes over to work about twice a week. “We’ve become very good friends. We are working together to bring back some semblance of interest to the gardens. We are also trying to envision what the land would have looked like years ago.”

While they work, they occasionally weave stories about the Hemlock family.

“When Sue and Lynn do their gardening and they find a button in the garden, they say things like, 'This is Ellen’s button' (the matriarch) and they make up a story about it,” Tom said. Susan added that they've found lots of things over the years, including lots of old tools like levels and planes in the summer kitchen.

“We’ve found chipped china and canning lids there. Ellen’s granddaughter, Annie Elizabeth Bradley, also lived here and was noted for her baking. In the summer kitchen we found the initials A.E.B. carved into the side of a window,” Hertel said.

Hertel, who lives in Grafton, said she’s loved the time she’s spent working on the property which will be featured in this year's Cedarburg Woman's Club Garden Walk on July 15 and 16.

“It’s an honor to be here and to connect the dots of the mystery (of my ancestors). I feel I’ve met them in a way. It’s been very rewarding," Hertel said. “It’s been a joy to create an oasis for nature with Sue and Tom and their sweet family. It’s a special place where we work with nature. As the author Douglas Tallamy reminds us in his wonderful books, we are all nature's best hope.  Each year we've been adding more native plants and seeing more nature come in to enjoy it."

They recently talked about the farm and its gardens.

You call the property Hemlock Farms. Who named it?

Susan: We named it after Lynn’s great-great-great grandparents.

Do you garden only with Lynn or does Tom get involved?

Susan: Tom does the hardscaping. He just redid some of the original rock borders. He does a lot of the big digging, and Lynn and I move all the little stuff and do the dividing and transplanting.

Where are your gardens?

Susan: They surround the house. They’re also around the summer kitchen, and there are some plantings around the barn. We also have a lot of wildflowers that grow in the fields. We have a lot of coneflowers, bee balm, and a lot of natives. We are a monarch way station, too.

Can you tell me about your ponds?

Tom: There are two of them behind the barn. One is about one-quarter acre; the other is about one-third acre. We’ve stocked them with bass and sunfish.

Susan: We inherited those. One of the ponds is spring-fed and one flows into the other. We have a lot of turtles and frogs and great blue heron that come to the pond daily. We get a lot of interesting birds and wildlife because of the ponds. We also have a pair of bald eagles.

Tom: We have a lot of ducks here, too. We have wood ducks, hooded merganser, and redhead ducks.

What is your style of gardening?

Susan: It’s casual, not formal. It would be cottage style. We have a really big assortment of plantings. They’re very thick and colorful.

Do you use chemicals or mulch in your gardens?

Susan: We just use organic practices. We hand weed everything all the time. We don’t treat our lawns. It’s a dandelion field of yellow. But we do mulch. We use shredded hemlock. And we will bring in organic fill if we need to. When we pot, plant or move anything, we use an organic mix. We do have a compost pile, but we don’t use it as much as I would like to.

Why do you prefer hemlock mulch?

Susan: Not only is the shred finer than many other wood mulches, but the color is a nice rich brown and it tends to hold its color longer. It adds nutrients like vitamin C to the soil and has several curative properties. It also contains tannins that help make it resistant to mold, mildew and bugs.

What are some of your favorite plants?

Susan: I love all the flowering stuff. I like the grape hyacinth in spring, and I love the eastern redbuds. They are spectacular. Also the native coneflowers and bee balm. They grow throughout property. I also like bat-faced cuphea. The flowers look like the faces of little bats.

Tom: One favorite is wine cups. It’s a ground-cover and it spreads throughout the gardens. It has dark fuschia/burgundy colored buttercup-shaped flowers. It’s not a native to Wisconsin, but it’s something you don’t see in a lot of gardens.

Lynn: Also wine cups, bloodroot and verbena rigida, which is an annual but it reseeds. And meadow blazing star, which is a nectar plant for monarchs. And salvias, agastache Blue Fortune, bigroot cranesbill geranium, rose campion, peonies and dahlias.

How many peony bushes do you have?

Susan: I don’t collect peonies, and they’re not special cultivars, but we do have about 30 bushes. We often cut them and give them to people.

How many beehives do you have?

Tom:  We have six hives. They are just south of the gardens. Last year we got 250 pounds of honey.

Susan: Tom is the beekeeper. He also taps his own maple syrup.

What are you planting in your pond?

Susan: We are just starting a restoration project there. We are trying to do native plantings. We consulted with experts on ponds and we have a three-year plan to add different plants each year. We don’t want to use any chemicals in the ponds because of the bees.

Tom: The plants will help the ponds get less algae, and will look pretty.

Any garden projects yet to do?

Susan: We will probably do a garden restoration at our house. Like anything, you keep evolving spaces. Some things work, some things don’t. We move things around until we find their happy space. We are constantly moving things around and trying new things.

What changes did you make to the farmhouse?

Susan: We wanted to renovate the house and make a modern version of a historic house. We started working on it in 2020 and spent a year renovating it. The interior is mostly what was there originally. We worked really hard to maintain the historical integrity of the house but put in modern amenities. We did this with the help of a firm that does historic renovations. Our son and his family moved in just as we were finishing the renovation.

When was the farmhouse built?

Tom: We assume the house was built in 1890, but we can’t confirm that. The barn was built in 1887, and the summer kitchen in 1886.

Was this ever a working farm?

Tom: We believe they began with sheep then transitioned to cattle.

What does your barn look like?

Tom: It’s pegged mortise and tenon joint. We’ve put a new roof on it. We have just tried to maintain what was there.

How do you use it?

Susan: We use it for storage, and we keep equipment in there. We keep firewood in there and our beekeeping equipment. We have also had three weddings out there and a number of fairly major fundraising events. We’ve also had some small events.

How was your summer kitchen used years ago, and how do you use it now?

Tom: Years ago it would have been used for baking in summer when people didn’t want to heat up their houses when it was hot outside. It also reduced the chance of fires in the houses.

Susan: Later the family may have used it as a milk house or a pump house. Now we use it as a potting shed. We store all our gardening things in there. It’s fairly large. It’s about 12-by-6 feet.

If you go

What: Cedarburg Woman’s Club 13th Annual Garden Walk: Tour four gardens in the Cedarburg area and Thiensville.

When: From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. July 15 and 16. Also tour the Cedarburg Art Museum’s gardens and museum from noon to 4 p.m.

Tickets: Advance tickets are $20 at Olson’s Piggly Wiggly in Mequon and Cedarburg, Heyden’s Gardens in Cedarburg, and at the Cornerstone Bank in Grafton. Tickets also are available at the gardens the day of the tour. Raffle tickets as well.

For more information: Including garden addresses, see cedarburgwomansclub.org or call (262) 375-4890.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Cedarburg couple is restoring their land with homesteader's descendant