We human animals spend much our life “avoiding” falls.
This is particularly true when the coming “fall” happens to be your 82nd birthday. Yet, without it I’d be already dead. (Oh, the irony of Life!) And without that fall there’d be no blessed Spring.
Fall, that is the autumn one in our Minnesota , is a very short Fall, often barely over a month long with every day the prospect of colder, much colder temperatures with darker days, and therefore the end of Spring and Summer.
Most “Minnesotans”, Europeans and others, since the disappearance of a thousand feet of our glacial ice over us a few thousands of years ago, spent most of their days working outdoors to survive. Prosperity’s cultural influence have sent these animals indoors, however, and have done so locally overwhelmingly IN MY LIFETIME.
In today’s newer homes and huge residential housing structures one measures the quality of life by avoiding the outdoors completely by ‘driving’ from kitchen to workplace without ever leaving a heated conveyance to avoid their enemy, their outdoors.
Fewer and fewer people in the general population have to be “bothered” about the look, the feel, the being of the outdoors, the grounds around the abode where they live. Fewer and fewer people understand the world of the plants around them and the “Gardens of Eden” their religions used to worship as the highest, most perfect, most beautiful environment of thinking animal life. (It also happens to be where our food and water come whether today’s human animal is aware of it or not.)
Winter in Minnesota is this part of the world’s longest landscape season of each year. It happens to be nearly as long as all other landscape seasons, Spring, Summer, and Fall, combined…..mid-October to mid-April…..and in my youth, even through the end of April into May.
In that youth city and town homeowners, nearly none of them wealthy in those days, most paying taxes on 45′ by 90′ foot properties, did their very best to maintain their lawns, foundation plantings, vegetable gardens and flower beds despite the city’s elm tree on their boulevard grass and the habitual silver maple tree in the middle of the front yard, the cheapest tree buy available, whether needed or not. Beyond the beauty of the rise of each Spring with the rebirth of its flowers and foliage, almost all of the landscape was “artless”….but it was usually well maintained and kept neat.
Tulips, hyacinths, daffodils, lilacs, bleeding hearts, marigolds, four 0’clocks, rhubarb, carrots, lettuce, and tomatoes were the order of the day. Pfitzer junipers covered cement blocks at the foundations of older houses.
Outdoors is where city and town folk used to meet, chat, and share……..at a time when so little was available to beautify so much to meet the standards of that day. Most homeowners could recognized a pine from a spruce, a conifer from an evergreen. Fortunately, most folks couldn’t afford the non-living junk that is sold at garden markets these days. The landscape was supposed to be welcoming to owner, neighbor, and visitor alike.
In the ideal landscape gardening is supposed to be an art form…..the most cherished in nearly all human society. “One is closest to God in the Garden” is a universal cliche. WINTER IS AS BEAUTIFUL A SEASON AS ANY OTHER SEASON OF THE YEAR!
Fall, however, is an excellent time to examine ones home and/or business grounds. Have such grounds been made beautiful for the coming fall of the leaves and temperatures? What remains in your home or business landscape grounds that is beautiful to behold?
THERE ARE MANY ROADS TO BEAUTY, FOLKS. Winter is as Beautiful as any other Season! Call us at 952-933-5777….Give us a chance to prove the Truth of this Truth.