28 May 2013

Rain, Rain, and More Rain….but Beautiful, if Brief, Landscape Gardens

Spring arrived for a day or two several weeks ago and apparently didn't like the setting. It yielded to cold and rain, rain, and more cold.....and made the color gray exceedingly dull, the only color in town. Unless, that is, you have a bunch of healthy conifers decorating the world around your residence. Add a number of flowering shrubs and trees and you have indeed become blessed this Spring. And then, there are the ground...

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20 May 2013

Thank you, Readers, for you Comments about our Comments about Boulders in the Landscape Garden

It's coming on four years since we at Masterpiece published the article on boulders in the Minnesota landscape garden which has turned out to be our most popular. Thank you for you comments. They still are collecting. However, we wrote then about boulders in the garden toward the end of the season, September 8, 2009, to be exact. I offer the reprint below in hopes it might still be useful reading for those contemplating there...

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19 May 2013

SPRING 2013: The Most Colorful Landscape Garden in Decades and Decades

We write mostly about Minnesota...Twin City area landscape gardening issues. With this in mind, I hear countless complaints about this Spring, Spring 2013 is a lousy one. I am one of these complainers....Cold, rainy, cloudy, windy, snowy for the first six weeks, more rain, more and more rain. Here it is only 30 days until the days become shorter...and shorter....and shorter. I am extra depressed already.....but then, before the rains, the heavy ones today, Sunday,...

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10 May 2013

The Significance of May 10 in the Twin City, Minnesota Area

There have been many complaints about this year's Spring in Minnesota. Where's the heat? Where has the Sun been? Why all this Snow in late April and May? Well, it's either too little CO2 if you accept modern mythology regarding Global Warming......now changed to "Climate Change" to cover all fronts political and climatological. We have had a throw back to my childhood decade....when these 'colds' in April and May were quite the habit.....and a very...

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