A people’s culture is imprisoned by the habits of the day. It is designed by religion, politics, and education or the lack of it whereever people collect and settle.
We live in an America that has been reduced to the indoors. Perhaps the majority of its population now believe that the tomato is manufactured at the local super market or factory.
We live in an America whose indoor college graduates in the social sciences believe that carbon dioxide is a polutant and must be eliminated from our atmosphere.
They know nearly nothing about the miracle of chlorophyll, but they are keen on manipulating the young human mind.
If a lateral branch of a tree stretches out at the four foot level from its main trunk, and the tree grows a foot per year, at what height will that branching be in those ten years?
I’d guess from my nearly life time experience in landscape gardening the majority of today’s urban Americans adult and otherwise, would be troubled finding the correct, but very, very simple answer to the question. Yet, the majority of these folks live in their own homes which are located on grounds which grow a number of trees and shrubs.
The national ignorance might be good for our landscape businesses, but it isn’t good for those of us in the landscape business who are interested in creating beauty to uplift the spirit and souls of all who bear witness to beauty…….which, of course, is the God-given reason that the human being, at least in Western culture, accepts landscaping of whatever kind around the houses where they live and many businesses where we still work.
The world’s Western population is an indoor population. It is a university controlled population. It has been instrumental in the killing of things classically beautiful, because it destroys so much of the individual’s personal creativity funneling it, diminishing it into the cheap, low, the empty, the spiritless, the bureaucratic mundane, taught by the unthinking, unimaginative, programmed instructor who was herself, himself were taught by the unthinking, unimaginvative, programmed instructor.
I spent two years as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota Department of Horticulture in the middle 1970s. I received some vital learnings which furthered my education about this generally outdoor art and science……soils, some more advanced learnings in botany and plant diseases and pests, but nothing at all of value regarding ‘horticulture’ for the world of landscape gardening. Nothing was offered in its art, history, purpose, its collective importance in the human domain………the most revered art form of all art forms.
In my two years of classroom horticulture imprisonments at the University of Minnesota Department of Landscaping, I never saw a single picture of any kind of a Minnesota winter setting. I did complain to Phd Professor, Jane MacKinnon, a charming, likeable, bright gal from Mississippi why the Department seemed to avoid presenting any information about the longest landscape season of the Minnesota year……as long as all of the other landscape seasons combined, she seemed shocked and stuttered, “Well, it’s much too depressing to even think about Winter.” …so, the inference was, why and what can we teach about its landscape.
I also have had some experience in the University of Minnesota’s Fine Arts Department some years later. The teaching of that art in that place seemed to be confined to lecture and lectures’ attacks on the idea of beauty……..almost entirely due to the fact they themselves were not artists at all, but bureaucrats to talked about art and made their students believe they could become artists, but no one ever seemed to learn how to create color mixes for they didn’t know how to mix paints.
What about the “art” of music…….how is that ‘taught’ these days. Why is beauty so totally absent from our music-deprived ears? Why has its noise become so akin to the smell of garbage in the street, but in aural form? At what university anywhere, coast to coast, in any continent north or south, has there been produced a Beethoven, whose music tells us how good it is to be alive, or even a composer of another “Piano Man”?
Why do we put up with this up-to-date and expensive university world which universally preaches the political and religious doctrine of the “Death of Beauty”?
You, dear home owner, can begin to change all this, by making a statement. How about starting a twenty square- foot area somewhere on the ground for which you pay taxes and establish as your goal to make this space BEAUTIFUL.
Begin to think “beauty”.
Do some reading and visiting first. Observe. Judge the good versus the bad. Ask yourself and answer, how and why they differ.
The landscape garden is a visual art form…..so is magic.
Like people, even those attending or graduating from university, not all plants are the same. They have their own genetic material which provides certain opportunities and limits to contributing to your happiness.
Help restore creating beauty into the American way of life. It is so much easier to slip into the ugly, the sloppy, the mundane, isn’t it?
Call us at Masterpiece, if you need assistance. We have alot of tips to share and home grounds to show. Our number is 952-933-5777.