03 May 2012

ATTENTION: NEIGHBORLY GARDEN PLANT SALE

NEW! GARDEN TOUR AND PERENNIAL SALE Garden tour and perennials for sale from two classic landscape gardens featured in the St Paul Pioneer Press, Mpls Star/Trib and Upper Midwest Garden magazines. You will see the plants available for sale in their idealized settings. Perennials include: SUN & SHADE GROUND COVERS (Canadian and European ginger, Iris cristata, Lysimachia'aurea', Sedum 'communis', sweet woodruff, Sedum Kamchaticum. Lamium, Vinca Minor (periwinkle), violets, assorted hen & chicks) WOODLAND PLANTS (Brunnera,...

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29 Apr 2012

Some Points about Pruning……Chapter I

Spring is probably the best time to 'prune' plant material in your garden, especially if your garden is a landscape garden..   I am about to give a demonstration for a dear client and friend of mine in her landscape garden Masteripiece installed about four or five years ago.    The 'show' will be also attended by her neighbor.    I shall have to rush. The vast majority of homeowners nearly everywhere in these parts of the good...

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14 Nov 2011

It has been very dry in the Garden this Fall. WATER NOW if you can.

This article should be considered a WARNING to any readers who planted or had us or anyone else plant new plant materials on your grounds since about the first of July this year in the Twin City area. We certainly had a number of rainfalls earlier in the year.   Many were of the plundering type in which the downpour was overwhelming but not terribly helpful to landscape garden plants.   Following these deluges, we have had...

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02 Nov 2011

Why is our 2011 November landscape garden so Beautiful?

If you have been 'playing'  in your landscape garden the past month you may have noticed that this October of our year, 2011, was special.....If so, why? My grounds throughout is at its most colorful best this early November   than  in all the 37 years I have lived here in the Hopkins area.  It is a landscape garden about 1/2 acre in size, laid out over the years by my passion to create beauty in...

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30 Oct 2011

Not all Minnesota Autumns are Equal

I spent  much of this gray  day involved in my own landscape garden.   I am loathe to call it work, for once I enter the space, I am too lost in its aura, too mesmerized  to feel any labor.    I become occupied and governed in deeds   the space has captured  me to do. Not all autumns are equal.   In my space this October has been one of the most beautiful ever.   Traditionally in the Twin City area, the...

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06 Oct 2011

Inviting Birds to Your MN Landcape Garden in October

I was a 'birder' by age 12.   I discovered their populations during my morning paper route which included homes  at the end of my route, near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota. Cliffs...stone abutments....huge boulders,  woods, slopes, and torrents of water moving southward, noisily and threateningly.  It was exciting to climb and sit and observe. What more could a paper boy  want   having delivered his papers by  5:30 in the morning with nothing around him but birds...

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01 Sep 2011

Fall is a Good Time to Plant

Yes, Autumn is a good time to plant.....especially in September.  I admit I prefer Spring as the best time for planting most of the more permanent garden material.   One can better view when something is going wrong with spring planted material. I usually don't recommend landscape gardeners go hunting for bargains when  looking for  principal plants, the most important trees and shrubs of your landcape picture.    Yet, let's admit it, most of us who are "taken"...

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17 Jul 2011

The Week of the Hot Weather Which has been WET

We in the Twin Cities landscape gardening world  have had a hot and wet several weeks following a very short Spring.   It was only one year ago our world was blessed with one of the most beautiful landscape garden seasons I can remember.......An early Spring....warm April, cool May, and a Summer of nothing general to have worried about.   Plantings with irrigation systems did exceptionally well making plants exceptionally healthy......and then November 13, 2010 visited and...

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18 Jul 2010

What Is This Thing Called “Weed”

No, not the stuff the foolish  smoke!  The stuff  that grows where folks don't want the stuff to grow. To the Landscape Garden artist there is only one definition for the word, "weed"..... A Weed is a Plant Out of Place!       That is the definition, the whole definition,  and nothing but the definition......to the Landscape Gardener. In my landscape garden the plants out of place most everywhere are tree seedlings....sugar maples, red maples, elm, Ohio buckeye,...

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10 May 2010

Ground Covers in the Landscape Garden

Mulch, soil, leaves, river rock are all ground covers.  Each have there own place in Earth's landscape  with river rock probably best located at the river. The ground covers honored by this article are the ones which produce flowers and the coniferous evergreens that like to spread. Have you ever seen a Japgarden juniper over fifteen feet wide.  You've missed a beauty if you haven't. Ground covers provide the negative space among  upright forms in the garden...

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