We at Masterpiece Landscaping install grounds irrigation for the landscape garden.
Nearly all of the folks trained to install irrigation systems know nothing about installing such systems in the classical landscape garden.
What is the difference?
Imagine a half acre of lawn. Only lawn….nothing but lawn; no maple trees here, arborvitaes and pine there, viburnum and magnolia, anemone and heuchera, sedum and “Hot Lips” turtlehead in sight. Only lawn, with or without dandelions.
Here installantion is simple and quite cheap. Installation of irrigation into a landscape garden is often much more complex, primarily depending on the placements of the tree and shrub material.
If your dream is to create landscape beauty for your home or business grounds, plant your masterpiece first. Let the irrigation follow the art, never the reverse, art following the irrigation system……unless, of course, you have no choice.
My family and I moved to my “landscape” canvas in Minnetonka where I still live, on January 1, 1974. Immediately with the coming spring, The grounds “yard” was almost entirely lawn. I began at certain edges around the property to develop the privacy required for a landscape garden. At that time I was heavy into pyramidal arborvitaes. They were cheap, grew rapidly, and didn’t cause any shade. Besides the foliage is very fragrant. Moreover, I was sculpting my winter garden as well. (None of the originals have survived to this day…..a result of a disastrous winter storm.)
Once established, arborvitaes (there are dozens and dozens of varieties) can tolerate the Twin City swings of water to drought quite well. Holding on to money while raising a family was not as easy, so I never dreamed I could ever reach the patrician heights of owning a first class irrigation system for my landscape garden.
I had it installed in 1990, but did not start to use it until four or five years later….let’s estimate 1995.
At that time my grounds already had sufficient structure and design to qualify as a “landscape garden”……but, barely, compared to its today’s form. Yet, the grounds were generally attractive, but not melodious, not harmonizing, not grand.
“Gardens like people gain character with age” I have always reminded my landscape garden students. My garden at age twenty or so had not yet reached maturity. Nor had its artist in so many respects.
By 1998, by then three years into its water irrigation life, nearly everything within the grounds where the regular, reliable water reached appeared lush.
Today, no one, including me, is more astounded at the lushness of greenery at every corner of these grounds. And to taunt those of you who have not yet made this wise investment into irrigating your own garden plants I do admit I face a new problem ever since regular watering became a way of my garden plants……
Astilbes have become a major weed here. ( if you think with the traditional meaning of weed…some plant showing up in your grounds which you didn’t plant and you feel you have to pull it.) I have thousands, I do believe, from the fifty or so I have planted here in my life time. Some are growing on logs.
But I am a staunch believer that “a weed is a plant out of place”. By now the majority of plants on my landscape garden grounds are volunteers which I have artistically accepted into my family of plants which I enjoy being among.
Nothing has made my trees and shrubs more healthy appearing, more rich and lush….and, yes, more beautiful than the introduction of artificial watering to my landscape garden.
P.S. I no longer kill my favorite perennials while dragging a hose around for advantageous placements for watering. I had learned to hate the garden hose. Now we are more tolerant of each other.
Give us a call at Masterpiece Landscaping, 952-933-5777 to schedule your irrigation installation quote.