We at Masterpiece are very proud of our friends in Waseca, Marian and Larry Fischer, Star Tribune Beautiful Garden winners a year ago. Their landscape garden dwarfs mine in size, spreading about 3 acres in all. It is exquisitely maintained and manicured. The setting is truly an oasis in a beautiful endless “sea” of corn.
We have been very blessed to have had the opportunity to work together with Marian and Larry to develop the grounds over the years. I am jealous of its beauty.
It is one form of landscape garden art to create the forms of the grounds…that is, answering the 3 questions in one, ” What goes where and why?”
It is yet another landscape garden art to maintain the beauty of the grounds.
The following article was written by Kim Palmer, a reporter with the StarTribune writing the the Home and Garden section. You can read the entire article and view the video at the StarTribune website…December, 2008 in the Home and Garden section.
From an interview with the Fischers, Ms. Palmer writes:
“I think I was born to be a gardener,” Marian said. “I’ve loved flowers and nature since I was a child.” Growing up on a dairy farm in Iowa, the oldest of seven children, nature was her escape from the clamor of a busy household. “I like peace and quiet,” she said. “Outside it was quiet.”
When she and Larry had children of their own — two sons — she raised them to savor the natural world as she had. “I would not let them sit in the house, even when they were young,” Marian said. If they wanted to watch Saturday-morning cartoons, they had to do it in a “wired” treehouse. “So at least they were outside.”
The strategy apparently worked; both sons are now gardeners themselves, and they and their friends congregate at the farm every fall for a big Oktoberfest, featuring a barn dance, bluegrass band and apple-pressing. “We are blessed with so many wonderful young people in our lives,” Marian said.
From field to woodland
From the beginning, Marian had a strong sense of what kind of landscape she wanted. Adding trees, for windbreak and shade, was a top priority. “I’m not into this restored prairie thing,” she said. “I was a child of the prairie, having spent so many hours in the hot, sticky field. I’ll go visit a prairie, but I don’t want to re-create one. I prefer shaded woodland.”
But she was still searching for ways to create the beauty that she thirsted for, even as others were starting to take notice of the Fischers’ efforts. In the mid-1980s, the couple’s garden was included on a tour as part of the Minnesota Horticulture Society’s convention. Little did Marian know that she was about to meet a mentor who would have a profound impact on her and her garden. Before the tour, the society’s director at the time, Glenn Ray, owner of Masterpiece Landscaping, came to preview their garden. Later, she went to hear him speak. “He talked about the fragrance of the lilac, and he said it with such passion,” she recalled. “Fragrance is really my thing.
A few years later, when she was on a mission to make her landscape more interesting during the winter months, she remembered Ray, looked up his phone number and asked if he did consulting, which he did. Marian has vivid memories of his first critique. “He said, ‘Why did you plant everything in straight rows?’ I said, ‘I’m German. I grew up on a farm.'”
She soon decided that Ray had the aesthetic sensibility she needed to lift her gardens to a new level. “I am a gardener. Glenn is an artist. It was obvious to me that he had what I didn’t.”
So she started hiring him every year, to refine her garden and do some of her pruning. One year, she showed him a heavily wooded area where farmers had been piling boulders for decades. “Glenn said, ‘You have a gold mine!'” Marian recalled.
That was the beginning of the dry streambed, a project four years in the making. Ray considers it “the jewel of her garden.”
The Fischers and their sons remember, and still laugh about, the painstaking process of building it. “Glenn is really fussy about the position of boulders,” Marian said. “He could spend an hour on one boulder, turning it this way and that, then say, ‘Sorry, that boulder isn’t going to work.'”
Early in their partnership, she followed his advice to the letter. “I don’t argue with Glenn. I would limit my horizons if I did,” she said.
But over the years, she has gotten bolder and more outspoken, she said. She’s redesigning one of her gardens now to reflect more of her own aesthetic. “We’re remaking this into a Marian garden rather than a Glenn garden,” she said. “I want flowers and beauty. He wants structure and form. We’re working on it.”
Ray doesn’t mind. In fact, he’s gratified to see her inner artist emerge. “She’s a wonderful student. When I met her everything ws in lines and squares. She had no confidence artistically. Now she’s part of telling me what she does and doesn’t like. She’s developed an eye.”
Comment: I think those who know me agree, even if painfully, that when I say, “I get as much pleasure from teaching about Landscape Gardening as I do about installing one”, it is true.
They know one lights me up as much as the other. Sometimes they have to endure both at the same time. My colleagues and friends are usually very forgiving, though. And Thank God.