We in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area this garden season thus far, are living our usual early May in middle April this year of our Lord, 2016. We have had a mild and short winter season. Being a landscape gardener, I have been rooting for a tad of global warming here in our Minnesota for the past sixty years....and my plea was almost answered until a few years ago of rough winter. The best garden...
Read More >>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,...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>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. ...
Read More >>This Twin City Autumn has been the kindest extension of Summer ever in my remembrance. Warmth without heat, rain without snow and wind. Leaf fall is merely one stage in the cycle of plant life here in our Northland. This is the season our Earth is being replenished with Earth's yesterday foliage in order to continue life's cycle. The health of our trees and shrubs ideally relies on water and its relationship with rot,...
Read More >>Sun, water, soil, and nutrients are the basic essentials for healthy garden plant growth.....Once again: SUN, WATER, SOIL, NUTRIENTS for plant and YOUR happiness!!! Sun: Not all garden plants, either woody or herbaceous, prefer full sun. Others disdain deep shade. Full sun might burn sensitive plants' leaves, turning them ugly brown or pathetic yellow. Deep shade advances diseases on wet leaves which are sensitive to rot. Nearly every perennial plant,...
Read More >>........and unfortunately neither do most commercial landscapers and professors at Departments of Horticulture at state universities. Landscape gardening in the present American world is considered among the lowest of lows among common human occupations. Even school janitors at all levels of American labor are more highly respected. Anyone can put a plant in the ground or mow lawns goes the talk in today's American cultural jungle.......and what is observed in most neighborhoods in...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>Not all Springs are equal. Almost two decades ago a measured thirteen inches of snow fell upon our population center this past week. Although I am a devoted fan of continued global warming, hoping for horticultural zone 5 to become our Twin City standard, I'll take this present Spring's mood any day of a decade. We are a bit short of regular spring waterings, but the temperatures have been quite modest, cool, not cold,...
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