"Special" woodies to me are shrubs and trees on my grounds which are simply EXTRA special.....not necessarily my favorite woodies, the ones I couldn't live without, but those I am extra thrilled to "own" as a part of my landscape garden life. I could not manage this outdoor life of mine without conifers with none as a group more special than the others. Name a creepy juniper, a mature White pine or Swiss Stone pine,...
Read More >>In our modern America such a question might have been asked in a court room, school room, a family kitchen, office room, or laboratory. I, thank God, arrived at a different generation with far different thoughts, beliefs and values. I was very lucky. "Weed" when I was young was more like an order. "Time for you to go out and 'weed' the garden", Mother used in verb form. The word in noun form referred to...
Read More >>Beauty is a word seldom used in our vocabulary these days. The present mood of our American age is to sell equality. If something is deemed beautiful, it stands to reason something therefore has to be less beautiful, that is, unbeautiful or even ugly and therefore unequal. Someone might be made to feel bad.....Oh, my! I was director of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society for nearly 14 years when our offices were housed at the...
Read More >>In elementary school and in ninth grade general science and tenth grade biology classes in the St. Paul public schools where I attended, students were 'forced' to develop tree leaf collections. There was no political pressure then to worship native plants as superior to those 'imported' since the times of early English settlement. Ignorance of vegetation, woody or herbaceous is so vast among the general American population these days of nearly everyone under age 60,...
Read More >>The landscape garden, 2013, has been the best ever this Spring......despite its short supply of dry and warm weather. But that's the point.... Remember that the Twin Cities is at the western edge of America's watering zones with the vast prairies beginning just to our out of town Twin City West. The prairies are the prairies because of their lack of moisture....end of story. The wetter East simply spread westward for Spring, 2013....along with some...
Read More >>I own almost 3/4 of an acre of landscape garden surrounding my rather boxy, not terribly attractive house. It was a white painted house when my family moved in, January 1, 1974. It was seventeen below zero Fahrenheit that evening. There is no uglier color for a house in Minnesota to be painted. Winter with its cold white, is the landscape season equal to all other seasons combined. Worse, the adjacent shutters were blue visually...
Read More >>Cool to cold, mid January to mid June......snow to rain, more rain, and a helluva lot more rain, mid January to mid June in the year of our Lord, 2013, Northland USA. What has this cooling and wetting meant for those of us oriented to the beauty of life living outside brick, concrete, asphalt, and flourescent lighting? For plants, the overwhelming number of them from an inch to 100 feet of stature, this has to...
Read More >>ANSWER: When a large enough tree is trimmed to be or by nature is programmed to be pyramidal.....that is more telephone pole than umbrella in shape. Unfortunately if there are 200 words, not including the names of plants, associated with performing landscape garden art, the typical homeowner knows about six. The worker at the local plant store knows ten. The modern American has become too divorced from the woody plant world around them. Most homeowners...
Read More >>Spring arrived for a day or two several weeks ago and apparently didn't like the setting. It yielded to cold and rain, rain, and more cold.....and made the color gray exceedingly dull, the only color in town. Unless, that is, you have a bunch of healthy conifers decorating the world around your residence. Add a number of flowering shrubs and trees and you have indeed become blessed this Spring. And then, there are the ground...
Read More >>It's coming on four years since we at Masterpiece published the article on boulders in the Minnesota landscape garden which has turned out to be our most popular. Thank you for you comments. They still are collecting. However, we wrote then about boulders in the garden toward the end of the season, September 8, 2009, to be exact. I offer the reprint below in hopes it might still be useful reading for those contemplating there...
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