The Bleak Season at my grounds last year began on Saturday, November 13 with a 32 inch dump of wet snow burying nearly every plant shorter than ten feet tall. This snow and a lot more following it lasted all winter long. There was no January thaw, the first in my memory causing drifts up to six feet making paths impassable. The snow was so deep I couldn't plow my body through the permasnow five feet deep where...
Read More >>By habit northerners, including amateur and professional 'horticulture' oriented people refer to color in the autumn garden as any color but green. Red, pink, scarlet, orange, rust, chartreuse, gold, yellow, maroon, plum....you get the idea......green is never listed. This is mainly the habit, monkey see, monkey do. But there is another reason why these days greens have become so much more important in the art of landscape gardening. Over the past twenty five years the greatest numbers...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>What is a 'tree' to the general Minnesota public? Most people would not think of defining it, answering something like "a woody perennial plant usually of fewer than five upright stems". If asked, most people will answer, "an elm".....or "a maple" or 'oak'.....not thinking that a White Pine and Colorado Spruce are also trees. So is a redbud and a pagoda dogwood, and even a winged euonymus, which is usually sold as a shrub at your...
Read More >>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"...
Read More >>Fellow Vikings and foreigners to our Northland.....This summer is the closest to the tropical in my gardening lifetime. Hot, humid, wet and tons of mosquitoes....not a winning season for us who 'work the soil', but the formula sure works for plants. I expect to see dinosauers any day now coming out of the jungle. At least there are no tsetse flies. Just plenty of Japanese beetles. Throughout the summer of 1988 there was more heat,...
Read More >>It is always the case that beautiful gardens must be seen most often at their very best......for the year, anyway. In Minnesota, today's garden quickly disappears into another piece of scenery never again to be seen in the form and beauty just witnessed. The Sun, the light of our landscape garden stage, thank heaven, never stops featuring Earth's exquisite beauty or squalor, for that matter. Gardens, like people, gain character with age. Our 2011 Minnesota...
Read More >>Over my lifetime and deeper into the Minnesota past "Spring" began psychologically for the northern gardener somewhere around February first of ever year. Most of the garden seed and plant catalogues had arrived by then. The dreaming about what could be and should be in the garden would begin. We bought our seeds from Northrop King....a Minnesota company whose home was located in Northeast Minneapolis. In the know garden people were Bachman's people. They would...
Read More >>The word suburb was not invented in 1950. It was used in landscaping a century earlier, but meant something different.....It referred to a part of a city's 'vacant' environs which hadn't yet been platted. This was true also in 1950. The population in both centuries was exploding. Homes had to be built. It was the American dream that rich and poor, and everything in between would live in a better society if every American family had its...
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