06 Dec 2011

Beauty in the Bleak Season

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...

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09 Nov 2011

Late Autumn Color in our Northern Landscape Garden

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...

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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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29 Sep 2011

The Trouble with Trees

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...

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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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02 Aug 2011

Summer – 2011: Hot….Humid….Wet….and Mosquitoie

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,...

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03 Jun 2011

Masterpiece Garden Visits Extended

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...

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25 Jan 2011

Welcome to Garden Year 2011

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...

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30 Dec 2010

Your House in the Landscape…….

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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