24 Mar 2016

Lilacs, El Nino, and our 2016 Minnesota Spring

El Nino is a Pacific Ocean current event.    The powerful primary Pacific currents normally in early winter   make their  turn North after  hitting  the American continent  somewhere around southern  Mexico.     Occasionally   they begin their northward turn much farther  to the South bringing greater warmth from equatorial  cloud and water  which has a warming effect from  western United all the way to Gopherland cakked  "El Nino".     Winter 2016  in...

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15 Dec 2015

“There’s a Change in the Weather” arriving to your TC Landscape Garden Very Soon

I celebrate the year, 2015 in suburban Twin Cities, Minnesota,  as the most comfortable, the most gentle, , the most pleasing to garden plants of all shapes and sizes, and therefore, the most beautiful of my memorable lifetime,  well perhaps only seventy years of it.   Further, when it was decided to rain, the wetness was somehow 'professionally' timed to arrive gently and sufficiently around every third day totally free from  angry cloud bursts.  ...

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31 Oct 2015

A Brief Review of the 2015 Local Landscape Garden Season

I am old enough to have lived a history which includes remembering in a broader sense  personal experiences from varieties of  weather  and seasons over the years. On two occasions around  World  War II time,  it snowed heavy wet stuff on my birthday of mid September, and  once later while watching a September Saturday  football game at old Memorial Stadium. I like winter here in Gopherland, but it is so long.    I have long...

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22 Jul 2015

When Should the Ideal Landscape Garden be at its Best?

When, at what season, does, should,  your landscape garden radiate its most inspiring  beauty? The answer is simple......Whenever you enter your Garden of Eden. I have lived at my grounds for over 40 years, long enough to be able to do,  genetically, mentally, physically, and culturally, what I was driven to do, planting and maintaining a beautiful  landscape garden  in some form or another. I have been very, very fortunate in life, and have many...

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10 Jun 2015

Spring, 2015 and the Landscaped Garden

From early May much of my life over  the past twenty years I have spent most of every day in someone's or my own gardened grounds. I cannot remember a May so pleasant, so cooperating a climate for gardener and garden member alike. Cool, not cold, moist, but not wet,  and above all no violent winds or down pours. This past Sunday was June 8, 2015.  I noticed my first mosquito bite of the landscape...

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28 Apr 2015

NOT ALL TWIN CITY SPRINGS ARE EQUAL

The Spring  lacing of deciduous tree foliage is about to begin in a day or two here in our Twin City landscape gardening area.  It's the time when our  major evergreen conifers no longer overwhelm our  winter's six month  landscape dominating the deciduous ghosts of Winter.  My 60 foot Red Maple is already  overwhelmed with young leaves and countless bloom clusters causing the first sign of casting  its shade.   A taller cottonwood, one-third of...

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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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12 Nov 2014

It has been reported that within 48 hours, the Temperature here Will Reach -3 degrees Fahrenheit

Imagine such a temperature forecast in these days of 'POLITICAL GLOBAL WARMING!" Anything for a vote! Fortunately, in the part of the Twin City metropolitan area where I live, about three inches of snow fell a few nights ago. Fortunately too, the half-acre of landscaped garden I manage has already been covered 'naturally' by four inches of fallen leaves blown in mostly from neighbors' mature oak, maple, and cottonwood trees. Quiz question: Which of these...

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09 Oct 2014

Frost Arrived at my Grounds This Morning, October 9, 2014

I was about to write an article at this post today that tomorrow, October 10th according to records, is the average date for the arrival of frost in these Twin City, America environs. However, when I stepped out onto my gardened grounds, I spied frost covering the here and there. This frost had not been predicted by the pundits. In the upper regions of my bit over a half acre gardened grounds, frost arrived for...

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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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