03 Feb 2017

The Beauty of the Fragrance of Human Manure In the Landscape Garden

Winter is rarely  a kind season for most of our landscape gardens and their gardeners  here in Minnesota.   Winds,  killer  evening temperatures,  crushing snow layers, sunburns on bark, deer, dogs,  and then there are the rabbits. Sixty years of rumor have told me   rabbits are hit with a vicious virus or two about every seven years which wipes out the vast majority of a settled rabbit population...,.I used to believe the rumor....until reviewing...

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20 Sep 2016

How Beautiful is the Drive to Your Garage?

BEAUTY AND YOUR GARAGE So, you're driving home from work.   Traffic is miserable.  Every day traffic seems to become more consuming of  the world in which  you  live.   Home.....to home,  paradise at last? What would paradise be....a bath?....a nap?.....playing with ones kids?.....supper?......a beautiful family  living in a beautiful setting,  all of these pleasures at their proper time? We at Masterpiece Landscaping are in the beautiful-setting business for homes and businesses.   The following...

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28 Aug 2016

Why Do Metropolitcan Politicians, Bureaucrats Make Community Streets So Ugly?

My parents bought the house in which  I was raised in 1936 in St. Paul, Minnesota.  It was newly built on a "vacant"  lot of  the more prairie edges  of  the city south of Randolph, west of Fairview down to the Mississippi River itself.  "Civilized" American urban areas were developed post Civil War with the arrival  of European immigrants for the next forty years or so.   Scandinavians, Germans, and Czech went rural.  Slavs, Italians went Iron...

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25 Aug 2016

WHAT, on Earth, IS A WEED?

Yes, what on Earth,IS a weed! Our governments and other fanatics who choose to  dictate human thoughts and moods these days, insist weeds are plant-like  things they've been programmed  to dislike in order to feel good.    These 'dictate' people are  indoor people...office people.....downtown people, usually government people  who live amid cement and asphalt.   If these people  are third or more generation Americans,  their grandparents were raised on a farm, not the street.....but they...

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04 Aug 2016

Is There a Sunkist Arborvitae in Your Future?

Masterpiece Landscaping is a Twin City, Minnesota  artistic landscaping company nearing its 30th birthday.   We line up and plant  garden trees, shrubs, annuals and perennials  in rows only when artistically required to fit  formal settings or for some other special artistic display to inspire visitors. Landscape gardens, ideally,  should inspire the designer, the builder, and above all,   the home or business owners and their visitors whom we serve. It should never be forgotten,...

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02 May 2016

The Spring Landscape Garden is the Most Beautiful

The vast majority of urban and suburban  home owners and others who visit the outdoors rather often,  are not particularly interested in beautiful landscape gardens.    Such gardens  are too rare   to be found.  If ever found, they are usually limited to the back 'yard'. Not that there might not be well manicured grounds, well mowed lawns, a healthy tree or two implying a degree of neatness and care somewhere.    But where are...

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19 Apr 2016

There is No Life Without Decay

Every year more and more Americans live and work indoors.   Every year more and more Americans know more nothing about their outdoors  where they live. I was lucky being born 82 years ago.   I was raised in the city, in a house on a ninety by forty-five foot lot taught to know the outdoors, both at home and at school.  It was in first grade before World War II when  I was first...

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07 Apr 2016

“Whither Goest Thine Eye?”……(with your landscape in mind)

Whether one lives in the woods, in suburbia, the city with "a yard" or on the 24th floor of some structure, most of us have two eyes which help lead us on our path from birth "to dusty death" as Shakespeare described the end for some. Our eyes  absorb things ugly and things of beauty.   What the eye absorbs usually becomes  habit forming.    Our todays are not carbon copies of yesterdays personally, collectively,...

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13 Jan 2016

Landscaped Gardening is Supposed to be an ART FORM

The human genesis  on the Earth of  our day  originally  'arrived' from a garden in our wonderful JudeoChristian religious teachings;  from  the  jungle in the more accurate scientific  vernacular.    This  we do know from the messages provided by genetics, geology, etc,etc.     It is amazing how accurately  the first chapters so artistically written in English of the King James Version of the JudeoChristian Bible fit the scientific understandings. There are many kinds of...

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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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