11 Mar 2015

March: Our Ugliest Month of the Landscape Garden Year

Most homeowners in our Minnesota communities ignore landscape gardens. Lawn and a shade tree in the middle of the front lawn, mud in the shadier depths, and the foundation plantings habits fits their needs for the duration. Probably most homeowners are poorer now than they have been for more than a decade. They endure living in their sterile environment. More females mow lawns these days than ever. The American husband population from coast to coast...

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24 Feb 2015

Beauty and the Landscape Garden

The gardened grounds around my house over which I have domain are about a half acre in size. However, the setting is enlarged by a near acre-sized pond adjacent to half of the back area of my property, a part under which I also "own", and an extensive hill rising from the rest of the back border covered with nature's collection of this and that woody deciduous growth, both the visually exceptional and its substory...

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07 Jan 2015

The Cold and Empty Minnesota Winter Landscape

The Landscape Garden of classic western and oriental culture is supposed to be an art form. "One is closest to God in the Garden"......Paradise of nearly all known human cultures has been described, imagined as a "Garden". Yet, at today's universities, in those which bother to include something oriented to landscaping of any kind, preach and enforce politics. Botany has become an unknown science to university undergraduate and graduate students except for perhaps at institutions...

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02 Oct 2014

A Review of our Landscape Garden Year, 2014

I have been very delinquent regarding my recordings of landscape garden arts at this Masterpiece Landscaping blog site. That I admit and regret. However, Nature has had something to do about that on two fronts this season: First, I reached my 80th year of life this past Summer.....Second, the pond along which more than two hundred feet of my gardened property abuts, flooded beyond anything previously recorded from the countless torrential rains of this past...

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19 Sep 2013

Enter from Stage North……Winter and Six Months Of It

October 10th is the average date in Minnesota's Twin Cities and environs of winter's first frost. My landscape gardening experience reminds me that over the past 25 years this first frost date has been delayed to around October 14th. Thank God! Landscape Gardening is supposed to be an art form. One would never know that 'supposed to be' by looking at our Twin Cities' practice of the art. In our modern day one has to...

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19 Jun 2013

The Special Spring Landscape Garden, Year 2013

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...

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11 Jun 2013

SPRING in our Northland….2013

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...

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15 Apr 2013

New Plants worth Talking about….and then Planting….

Landscape gardening is a visual art form.....and so is the magician's magic. Beethoven's masterpieces are aural art forms. We want to exert feelings to the eye as Beethoven causes for the ear.....after all ...beauty is better than the ugly, but remember, if everything is equally beautiful, it is logically equally ugly. The abcs of creating a beautiful Landscape garden is the major question in three parts: What is to be planted Where, and Why should...

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22 Mar 2013

Among the Best People in the World are Those Who Garden Their Grounds

If there are 1,243,772 pieces of knowledge necessary to command ones personal computer, I know about 17 and a half. I spent years fighting the idea of placing my face in front of an invention with a screen that was even more vacuous than what usually appears on television. Eventually, I discovered that I was wrong.....but I was too late along in life for me to recover from lost time gathering computer expertise. Nevertheless, the...

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09 Jan 2013

How Beautiful and Inspiring are Your Winter Grounds?

In our part of Minnesota the Winter landscape is equal in duration to our Spring, Summer, and Fall landscapes put together. Do your own adding. With the exception of some oaks, leaf fall is over before the first of November. Leafing out in Spring invarably begins the week of May 15 here in the Twin Cities dictated by the habits of our major deciduous shade trees. This lacing of our landscape is one of the...

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