.....if one, especially the homeowner, has prepared for it. I cannot remember a winter more visually more beautiful than our present sample of snow and cold. It's been colder, much colder in the past. It has snowed, and snowed heavier in the past....but a winter such as ours here in the Twin Cities of Minnesota this season, cannot be beat for its beauty. I wonder how many of our fellow Twin Citians have recognized what...
Read More >>Unfortunately for the broader community, our Minnesota landscape industry does not view 'landscaping' as an art form. At university it is not taught as an art form. The ladies of the garden clubs love flowers. They do not consider the home grounds as a canvas for landscape garden beauty. Husbands are allowed to mow the lawn. Cities often demand trees be planted along the roadways whether needed or not and without regard for beauty. My...
Read More >>October 10th is the average date in Minnesota's Twin Cities and environs of winter's first frost. My landscape gardening experience reminds me that over the past 25 years this first frost date has been delayed to around October 14th. Thank God! Landscape Gardening is supposed to be an art form. One would never know that 'supposed to be' by looking at our Twin Cities' practice of the art. In our modern day one has to...
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 >>Beauty is a word seldom used in our vocabulary these days. The present mood of our American age is to sell equality. If something is deemed beautiful, it stands to reason something therefore has to be less beautiful, that is, unbeautiful or even ugly and therefore unequal. Someone might be made to feel bad.....Oh, my! I was director of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society for nearly 14 years when our offices were housed at the...
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 >>ANSWER: When a large enough tree is trimmed to be or by nature is programmed to be pyramidal.....that is more telephone pole than umbrella in shape. Unfortunately if there are 200 words, not including the names of plants, associated with performing landscape garden art, the typical homeowner knows about six. The worker at the local plant store knows ten. The modern American has become too divorced from the woody plant world around them. Most homeowners...
Read More >>It's coming on four years since we at Masterpiece published the article on boulders in the Minnesota landscape garden which has turned out to be our most popular. Thank you for you comments. They still are collecting. However, we wrote then about boulders in the garden toward the end of the season, September 8, 2009, to be exact. I offer the reprint below in hopes it might still be useful reading for those contemplating there...
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,...
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