We human animals spend much our life "avoiding" falls. This is particularly true when the coming "fall" happens to be your 82nd birthday. Yet, without it I'd be already dead. (Oh, the irony of Life!) And without that fall there'd be no blessed Spring. Fall, that is the autumn one in our Minnesota , is a very short Fall, often barely over a month long with every day the prospect of colder, much colder...
Read More >>Spring is not, by calendar, that far away from today's February if you are a devoted landscape gardener.....in particular one who is devoted to express this love as it classically is supposed to be......from one's soul. Throughout the history of mankind, there are two 'far superior' spiritually-driven artistic forms of human expression above all others....."Paradise from beautiful music....and paradise from beautiful Earth. Religiously....."One is closest to God..in the Garden," so truthfully discovered by and...
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 >>I have long rooted for global warming....well, not so much global warming as Minnesota warming.....up to a point, of course. That point would occur when the Earth around where I live enters Horticultural zone five.....No warmer, and certainly no cooler. Why would I want to slip back into the dark ages of landscaping in Horticultural zone 3.5 or 4.0? I'll never see the day, but I have craved to be able to landscape in a...
Read More >>I love deer. My hunter-son hunts them during hunting season. We both are devoted to our occasionally gainful occupation in life, landscape gardening. My home, therefore my landscape gardened grounds which surround it, is located in the third tier of middle, very middle class Minneapolis suburbs. Streets here were planned to curve when homes were built in the late 1950s. The lots are bigger, more often the 250 by 120 foot irreglarly-shaped kind rather than...
Read More >>We should have shared this Onslaught of Winter article with readers a few weeks ago. However, the nature of this particular Twin City late autumn has been keeping our company busy until the real snow arrives. Each autumn in our area is unique in its appearance and character. No one seems to record each year's peculiarities and we usually remember only the extremes....especially the thirty inches one Halloween in the 1990s and a repeat the...
Read More >>The most beautiful winter landscape garden in my thirty eight years of living here in Minnetonka occurred this winter, 2011-2o12. In this the first winter without a January or February in the Twin Cities to my knowledge, there was little snow, no rain, and no cold. The yellows of the golden chamaecyparis, sunkist and yellow ribbon arborvitaes, the plum of the Andorra junipers, blues of the Dwarf Colorado blue spruce and even the blue pfitzers...
Read More >>Snowfalls are great for Landscape Companies in cold climes like Minnesota who have a snowplowing business in Winter. We, at Masterpiece are one of them. Winter is a good time for certain kinds of pruning, but most gardens in these parts are in deep sleep this time of year. Thank God for plowing driveways. I have just spent a couple hours prowling through my own gardened grounds to do some pruning and prepare some conifers for a...
Read More >>When is a weed a weed. When it is a dandelion? Well, maybe....usually yes, because dandelions makes a lovely lawn appear ugly, expecially when the seeds are produced. Because the seeds are produced in such numbers, dandelions become a more noticeable weed. In our Masterpiece Landscaping dictionary, a weed is defined as "a plant out of place". Our Masterpiece Landscape garden where I live doesn't have much lawn. If there are dandelions, they occur occasionally...
Read More >>The present winter, the one without a January and February, has been an agitating one. We've been waiting winter's arrival since November 13th , the anniversary of the 25-35 inch snowfall the year before; the winter without any thaw in both January and February. The snow kept coming down and piling up around us. Landscape gardens disppeared, hibernating under the snow until mid March a year ago. I couldn't walk my grounds all snow...
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