Whether one lives in the woods, in suburbia, the city with “a yard” or on the 24th floor of some structure, most of us have two eyes which help lead us on our path from birth “to dusty death” as Shakespeare described the end for some.
Our eyes absorb things ugly and things of beauty. What the eye absorbs usually becomes habit forming. Our todays are not carbon copies of yesterdays personally, collectively, and morally. So, who are we today….from the view of the author of this ‘note’ crowding in on his 82nd birthday?
Beauty is far less cherished today than yesterday’s yesterdays. The human animal is no longer surrounded by cause for beauty as an expression in life to uplift one’s soul. If something is beautiful, it means something is LESS beautiful, therefore causing discomfort, sorrow, despair and jealousy for the ‘victims’. Therefore, in today’s America it is better NOT to have “SOUL”….so all of us can feel ‘equal’…….
Today in our ‘cultural’ year 2016, NONE of our artistic expressions including the art of landscape gardening, are focused upon creating beauty. Nearly all ‘professionally’ are products of our America’s departments of “ART” where university bureaucrats preach the pictures, forms, and politics of their day.
Things beautiful were “forever” created by the human male animal…..whether in old China, old Europe, Old Amazon territory, in ‘barbaric’ Vikingland, or the Easter Islands. It is in the human male animal DNA to roam, explore, defend, build, protect, be curious, be industrious, to invent, to paint, sculpt, landscape, from his genetic material driving him to produce comfort, health, and beauty for his mate and off spring. It has been the human male animal’s DNA in his Nature, the God-given drive to survive, which has driven the world until the arrival of today’s politically, sexually “remodeled” western institutions where FEELINGS now replace LEARNINGS.
I was in first grade a couple of years before the bombing of Pearl Harbor. My teacher’s name was Florence Ray…a tall beautiful woman, but no relation to my family. Although I lived in the city, St. Paul, Minnesota, knowing the outdoors was considered very important in the learning world of the day. So was classical music and some kind of introduction to beautiful literature, paintings, sculpture, and the appropriate placement of words whenever such words were needed. (Swearing in public whether on the street, at home, or in school, did not occur. People then were churched to feel ugly whenever performing the ugly and to believe a price would be paid for selling or acting out the ugly.)
It was in first grade I first received classroom instructions to collect tree leaves for identification. I learned what a conifer was. It was then I discovered perennials “Obedience”, “Bleeding Heart”, “Peonies”, and biennials – annuals; “Evening primrose “, “4 O’Clocks”, Hesperus, “Petunias, Marigolds, and shrub roses, Pfitzer junipers, and Bridal wreath Spiraea. The following year I fell into “paradise in exile”, when it became my responsibility to have ‘sole’ as well as “soul” care for a double empty lot -sized Victory Garden across our alley. “I” grew and maintained nearly every kitchen vegetable you could name….even okra. Digging by hand for potato tubers made me feel like digging for gold.
I even learned to dive bomb the potato beetles as I plucked them off leaves and smushed them by hand. It was world war time, remember. I was pretending to aid the war effort. I also knew exactly where tomatoes came from…for there were very few super markets in those days.
I wonder how many households today include children. I wonder how many of the households who do have children, bother to teach the young what I was taught about the outdoors by setting examples exploiting their home grounds to become a teaching “room” for discovering beauty of the landscape garden. I wonder how many households of people who pay taxes for the grounds they occupy yearn to enter the outdoors for the beauty it offers the eye, mind, and soul of anyone who enters it.
Landscape gardening, in the ideal, is supposed to be a visual art form to inspire all who enter. It should be to the eye, what Beethoven’s adagios are for the ear…..to help you, for a moment or several , enter some place special to escape the outside day, and discover beauty over which you have a piece of control.
If you have interest in becoming acquainted with creating garden “pictures” such as those I have written above…….please give us at Masterpiece Landscaping a call at 952-933-5777, for an evaluation of your home or business grounds, and the means to introduce a touch of paradise for your being or, and the essentials regarding how to care for it.
Some things are simply more beautiful than others…..with reasons too many to describe or even know. However there are some ‘rules’ many of which are vital in creating the visually spectacular or quiet. “Tricks of the trade”, we at Masterpiece call them. Beethoven’s adagios were no bought! They came from a human brain led to by the ear, knowledge, and experience of his day.
On the front page entry to this website you will find a series of pictures, nearly 100, of various settings we have created for clients. Not all of them are of equal beauty. Beauty in our business relies primarily on space available, choice of material, maintenance, and a location based upon controlling what the eye should see from primary, secondary and so on, settings. As you view the settings, ‘grade’ the beauty of the picture….and then, far more importantly, determine by language why it is more or less beautiful than another.