October 10th is the average date in Minnesota’s Twin Cities and environs of winter’s first frost.
My landscape gardening experience reminds me that over the past 25 years this first frost date has been delayed to around October 14th. Thank God!
Landscape Gardening is supposed to be an art form. One would never know that ‘supposed to be’ by looking at our Twin Cities’ practice of the art.
In our modern day one has to pay to see bad plays, bad dance, bad paintings, bad football, baseball, and basketball…..all very dominant in our big city community. Bad landscaping is everywhere and is free for the viewing. We drive past it every day.
It’s been about 40 years now since ‘beauty’ and its relative ‘beautiful’ have disappeared from general use verbal and written. The new religion in town dictates that if something is beautiful it automatically judges something as less beautiful, even ugly…..and we cannot have a society that makes such judgments. Everything is supposed to be made equal.
We have been told at university that ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’…..a dishonesty of the first order.
I used to teach classes “Landscaping the Minnesota Home Grounds” and “Beauty in the Bleak Season” through the Minnesota Extension Service in the early 1980s. I tested the beauty in the eye business by showing slides to the class asking the students which setting is more beautiful: slide A or slide B based upon my experience in the art of landscape gardening armed with logical and accurate reasons to compare differences.
Each class session began with twenty of such comparisons. Student…all adults….were required to place each answer on paper, so we could hold them responsible for their decisions and therefore ask why they had made their choice. (Students of any age, generally cheat if only raising a hand is required for divulging an opinion in public view. They are so worried they might choose the wrong answer and be humiliated in public for the mistake, they hesitate waiting to agree with the flow of hands raised without thinking much about actually making a choice. A little teasing from me, the teacher, would ease the students from worry. )
I also often chose pictures where decisions of beauty could be reasonably argued….leading to the opportunity for the class to use every day vocabulary to defend their view of what they saw on the slide. By learning to use our simple every day vocabulary to explain why something is beautiful or more beautiful, depends upon thinking before speaking. What is actually seen in landscape garden beauty and heard in so much of Beethoven’s glorious classical adagios that actually make our day come to a halt?
We ourselves become potentially better artists by merely recognizing the tricks of the trade which create beauty. We also become better people when we are stimulated by the beauty we hear and see.
What we see in the Twin City landscape isn’t particularly inspiring. Nature has given the population a great setting and compared to other American metropolitan areas our community is clean and has many well coiffed neighborhoods which occasionally may seem acceptable, but in reality are neatly kept rather than beautifully created for the art of landscape gardening has been dead here and generally around the country for generations. Garrishness and tackiness usually accompany wealthy areas both suburban and urban. Foundation plantings are still a habit whether needed or not. Major trees still are planted willy-nilly, whether a curse or a blessing, because it makes people, especially politicians, feel good.
Beauty within the city starts with the home and business owners. Most look at the art of landscape gardening as a duty, a chore to hide the ugly. Landscape centers who advertise landscaping learn a trade rather than an art form. The University of Minnesota is primarily to blame for the death of the art of landscape gardening by passing the industry as a trade…..and a rather low class one at that.
The longest landscape season in Minnesota is Winter which is equal in length to all the other landscape seasons combined. One would think the Twin Cities would be a mecca of winter beauty throughout these six months of visual barrenness we have become so accustomed to.
Check things out for yourself, especially you who know first hand what I am writing. Study first your own neighborhood and begin to discern what is or is not beautiful and then translate your thoughts into real words.
Begin your observations as soon as possible….as autumn begins its quick pace, for the winds of winter will soon follow.
Is your neighborhood, are your grounds pictures of exquisite landscape beauty for our world to admire?
Warning: The love to create or live within a landscape garden is addictive. It may become injurious to your wealth.