If you have been 'playing' in your landscape garden the past month you may have noticed that this October of our year, 2011, was special.....If so, why? My grounds throughout is at its most colorful best this early November than in all the 37 years I have lived here in the Hopkins area. It is a landscape garden about 1/2 acre in size, laid out over the years by my passion to create beauty in...
Read More >>I spent much of this gray day involved in my own landscape garden. I am loathe to call it work, for once I enter the space, I am too lost in its aura, too mesmerized to feel any labor. I become occupied and governed in deeds the space has captured me to do. Not all autumns are equal. In my space this October has been one of the most beautiful ever. Traditionally in the Twin City area, the...
Read More >>I was a 'birder' by age 12. I discovered their populations during my morning paper route which included homes at the end of my route, near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota. Cliffs...stone abutments....huge boulders, woods, slopes, and torrents of water moving southward, noisily and threateningly. It was exciting to climb and sit and observe. What more could a paper boy want having delivered his papers by 5:30 in the morning with nothing around him but birds...
Read More >>Since our monsoons of early summer, there has been a drought in the general Twin City area. For well established plants there generally shouldn't be much concern....as yet. For newly planted woody plants and perennials regular watering......that is reliable water availability is essential for survival. A prolonged period of drought has about the same effect on woody plants regardless of soil type. Plants will wilt and die sooner in sandy soils. They also recover sooner,...
Read More >>What is a 'tree' to the general Minnesota public? Most people would not think of defining it, answering something like "a woody perennial plant usually of fewer than five upright stems". If asked, most people will answer, "an elm".....or "a maple" or 'oak'.....not thinking that a White Pine and Colorado Spruce are also trees. So is a redbud and a pagoda dogwood, and even a winged euonymus, which is usually sold as a shrub at your...
Read More >>The most important woody plants for any Minnesota landscape garden are the conifer evergreens. If you were to ask most Minnesotans, the garden aware or not, what the longest landscape season in Minnesota might be, they would be confused, hesitant, unsure how to answer, rather than think first and reveal the answer everyone knows....WINTER! In fact our Minnesota winter is equal to all of its other landscape seasons, Spring, Summer, and Autumn, combined. Here in the Twin Cities...
Read More >>Yes, Autumn is a good time to plant.....especially in September. I admit I prefer Spring as the best time for planting most of the more permanent garden material. One can better view when something is going wrong with spring planted material. I usually don't recommend landscape gardeners go hunting for bargains when looking for principal plants, the most important trees and shrubs of your landcape picture. Yet, let's admit it, most of us who are "taken"...
Read More >>........and this year September is arriving a bit early for my Swiss Stone Pines......the interior needles are beginning to turn yellowish. Autumn begins June 21st or is it the 22nd now with the beginning of the shortenning of the day. Our Northland's deciduous trees are already working on cutting off their today's leaves. Nearly all will be dropped by November 1st, year in and year out. Some of us are lucky enough to grow white oaks...
Read More >>Fellow Vikings and foreigners to our Northland.....This summer is the closest to the tropical in my gardening lifetime. Hot, humid, wet and tons of mosquitoes....not a winning season for us who 'work the soil', but the formula sure works for plants. I expect to see dinosauers any day now coming out of the jungle. At least there are no tsetse flies. Just plenty of Japanese beetles. Throughout the summer of 1988 there was more heat,...
Read More >>We in the Twin Cities landscape gardening world have had a hot and wet several weeks following a very short Spring. It was only one year ago our world was blessed with one of the most beautiful landscape garden seasons I can remember.......An early Spring....warm April, cool May, and a Summer of nothing general to have worried about. Plantings with irrigation systems did exceptionally well making plants exceptionally healthy......and then November 13, 2010 visited and...
Read More >>