My landscape garden abuts a man-made pond with about 200 feet of "shoreline". The pond was the trumpcard ensuring my drive to purchase the property late 1973. True, the house was an uninteresting box and smaller than our Minneapolis home, but I was finished with city life. Hippies with all of their ugly, had invaded our neighborhood....and I had three children to raise. The box was at the end of a cul de sac where...
Read More >>"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 >>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 >>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 >>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 >>We write mostly about Minnesota...Twin City area landscape gardening issues. With this in mind, I hear countless complaints about this Spring, Spring 2013 is a lousy one. I am one of these complainers....Cold, rainy, cloudy, windy, snowy for the first six weeks, more rain, more and more rain. Here it is only 30 days until the days become shorter...and shorter....and shorter. I am extra depressed already.....but then, before the rains, the heavy ones today, Sunday,...
Read More >>There have been many complaints about this year's Spring in Minnesota. Where's the heat? Where has the Sun been? Why all this Snow in late April and May? Well, it's either too little CO2 if you accept modern mythology regarding Global Warming......now changed to "Climate Change" to cover all fronts political and climatological. We have had a throw back to my childhood decade....when these 'colds' in April and May were quite the habit.....and a very...
Read More >>This snow and cold business here in 2013 "Spring" Twin Cities is getting kind of OLD. Mother Nature seems to be taxing us for the magnificent, best of all Springs, which occurred just one year ago when Spring arrived on March 15 and ruled until the beginning of Summer in late June. Eranthis, Snowdrops, and Siberian squill all began bloom last week in our grounds. They are still in bloom but completely unnoticed under ten...
Read More >>We have had late, late Spring 'winter' storms in the past. One, one of the worst, occured as late as early May with a dumping here of 13 inches. My conifers weren't into teenagers or adults yet. They were still so cuddly and easily managed. Not all conifers are equal in their abilities to stay in one piece during excessively heavy snowfalls. Let me start with the toughest....or better yet, those which easily handle heavy...
Read More >>Three to five inches of light gentle snow settled once again upon our Twin City Minnesota landscapes again last night stretching to a few moments ago. It is still cloudy. There are no shadows, no forms performing radiantly on stage showing off their grace and form, their dark and white, the purity of beauty equal to Nature's best. Gray it may be, but the purity for beauty is just as gracious, just as awesome, quieter,...
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