12 Sep 2016

THE BEGINNING OF THE FALL

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...

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28 Aug 2016

Why Do Metropolitcan Politicians, Bureaucrats Make Community Streets So Ugly?

My parents bought the house in which  I was raised in 1936 in St. Paul, Minnesota.  It was newly built on a "vacant"  lot of  the more prairie edges  of  the city south of Randolph, west of Fairview down to the Mississippi River itself.  "Civilized" American urban areas were developed post Civil War with the arrival  of European immigrants for the next forty years or so.   Scandinavians, Germans, and Czech went rural.  Slavs, Italians went Iron...

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06 Feb 2016

Landscape Garden Thoughts Best to Consider in our Northland February and Early March

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...

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13 Jan 2016

Landscaped Gardening is Supposed to be an ART FORM

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...

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22 Jul 2015

When Should the Ideal Landscape Garden be at its Best?

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...

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28 Apr 2015

NOT ALL TWIN CITY SPRINGS ARE EQUAL

The Spring  lacing of deciduous tree foliage is about to begin in a day or two here in our Twin City landscape gardening area.  It's the time when our  major evergreen conifers no longer overwhelm our  winter's six month  landscape dominating the deciduous ghosts of Winter.  My 60 foot Red Maple is already  overwhelmed with young leaves and countless bloom clusters causing the first sign of casting  its shade.   A taller cottonwood, one-third of...

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08 Apr 2015

Too Much Lawn on your HOME GROUNDS?

There can be  no doubt that a well manicured  lawn  on one's outside home grounds  is as beautiful as a stunning Oriental Carpet is  on the inside of a person's domain.  Yet, if left alone in a vast room of nothing else, how winsome can they really ever  be if they lie  alone in their space? One carpet requires  great human effort to maintain its beauty, which actually includes another art form, the clipping  of the...

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06 Apr 2015

The Landscape Garden as an Art Form in our Northland

Fewer and fewer Americans engage in 'monkeying around ones grounds' these days. Fewer and fewer Americans can identify five plants growing on their property or grounds near by. Fewer and fewer people bother tending to 'gardens'. More and ever more Americans live all of their lives just a few feet above asphalt. Fewer and fewer Americans have children.....We now import them for political as well as economic reasons. Botany is no longer taught at school....at...

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11 Mar 2015

March: Our Ugliest Month of the Landscape Garden Year

Most homeowners in our Minnesota communities ignore landscape gardens. Lawn and a shade tree in the middle of the front lawn, mud in the shadier depths, and the foundation plantings habits fits their needs for the duration. Probably most homeowners are poorer now than they have been for more than a decade. They endure living in their sterile environment. More females mow lawns these days than ever. The American husband population from coast to coast...

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07 Jan 2015

The Cold and Empty Minnesota Winter Landscape

The Landscape Garden of classic western and oriental culture is supposed to be an art form. "One is closest to God in the Garden"......Paradise of nearly all known human cultures has been described, imagined as a "Garden". Yet, at today's universities, in those which bother to include something oriented to landscaping of any kind, preach and enforce politics. Botany has become an unknown science to university undergraduate and graduate students except for perhaps at institutions...

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