BUTCHART GARDENS // VANCOUVER ISLAND, BRITISH COLUMBIA
Color in the well developed landscape garden usually conquers all other senses and moods possessed by the human visitor. It is the most enticing lure collecting visitors. Spring is usually the season when the most spectacular of color shows occur. The foliage is fresh in color and texture especially in our Minnesota location.
It is obvious to us northern landscape gardeners the beautiful colorful display below did not occur in our climate zone. We in the North do not have anywhere near the broad pallet from which to choose our colors and the shapes and sizes of plants carrying such colors. Nevertheless, such a beautiful landscape garden as you view below can be, and is managed in our communities, but with fewer varieties of perennial plants and the length of time their spectacular colors can be displayed.
The growing season is very, very short in our Twin City area compared to Vancouver Island. The island, if I can remember by geography correctly, is North of our metropolitan community. It’s the moisture and the lack of our Minnesota winter there which guarantees a far greater number of beautiful flowering perennial plants from which to choose when planting.
From this view of this garden setting, to what planting, most likely, will your eye be lured to view first?
The human male has many varieties of colorblindness which may interfere with the generalization to be written here. It is likely that the majority of first viewers of this setting, their colorblindness tendencies notwithstanding, will be captured by the size and shape of the colorful tree in the center and then move immediately to the right where white floral ground covers are central amidst a large setting of many colors of several shapes and sizes. White, yellow, chartreuse, orange lead the list in an order of colors commanding first human glance in the garden, with all things being equally ‘lit’. Even in the light shade below, white dominates the first glance which quickly moves on to community of colors surrounding it. Some folks will be tagged at the light lavender to the back ground right, yet other eyes might be captured by the brilliantly colored lawn leading the red on the left before returning to dwell on the beauty of the FORM of the tree central to the picture.
Viewers should remember that floral color on perennials, both herbaceous and woody, is almost always brief. In our Minnesota a week to three weeks at the most is common.
In our Minnesota, winter is the longest landscape garden season of the year, as long as all other seasons combined….This truth, this reality seems to be totally unknown to government, home owners, most citizens by the winter displays of ‘gardened’ grounds. “Beauty in the Minnesota winter landscape garden” is a rare sight except for grounds created by Masterpiece Landscaping.
How would you grade the beauty quotient of winter settings of the home grounds in your neighborhood?
Call us at Masterpiece, 612-933-5777 for assistance if your ‘settings’ are starved of the beautiful.
