Winter! Yes, you guessed it…..or did you? Some people forget that Winter is a landscape season.
Most Minnesotans divorce themselves from landscaping the home grounds for Winter. What is there to do but shovel snow? Garden fever begins sometime in February, but it is a low grade fever caused by impatience and garden magazines beginning to be noticed on various store shelves. Then the garden catalogues arrive causing real angst.
Most Minnesotans pay no attention to how ugly their home landscaping is in Winter. For many, ugly landscaping is a 365 day per year experience both for homeowner and neighbors. I know we are not supposed to judge. We are supposed to make everyone feel like a champion, so let us just say that some home landscapes are not as joyful as others.
When I visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras recently, a city struggling to rise above poverty with people of very modest means working to keep their home spaces clean and neat, I marveled at the efforts of folks maintaining their small spaces with shrubs and flowers. The act itself says so much about the people who perform it.
Winter is the longest landscape season in Minnesota. It lasts as long as all of the other seasons combined. The Spring landscape begins roughly around May 1st in the Twin Cities lasting for about one month when foliage is no longer new. Summer lasts until mid September, when the sumac begins to redden. Autumn, the season of the Fall of leaves, lasts until about November1.
How long is the winter landscape in Twin Cities, Minnesota, then….November 1 through April 30? Well, let’s add it all up…about 180 days give or take a week or so.
Why do so many Minnesotans prefer to live in landscape misery for one half of each year of their lives living in the northland?
I think there are two main reasons. One, it is difficult to plan ahead in general. One must garden for winter beauty during another season of the year, and Two, not enough value is placed on coniferous evergreens in the northern garden. Gardens are too often limited to areas with colorful flowers. Women traditionally like these flowers and are usually confined to thinking flower gardens as their world.
But flower gardens don’t show much in Winter. They are usually covered with the same depth of snow everything else is. Deciduous shrubs, if there are any, look pretty dead without their leaves. Elms lining city streets used to be an attraction in winter especially when they were well pruned, but they’re all gone now, replaced by a lot of mishmash.
Have you rated your own grounds on their Winter beauty, yet? How many times a week do you walk through your Winter garden? Have you ever noticed the beautiful Theodor Wirth park area in Minneapolis in Winter? Are you lucky enough to live in or visit beautiful Duluth in Winter? Or travel the highway near Taylor Falls or around Hackensack on your way to Bemidji?
No garden of any other season is more beautiful than a beautiful winter landscape garden!
Central to that beauty in Minnesota is the evergreen conifer. When we at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd. evaluate landscape settings for our clients, we begin planning by establishing the design for winter setting.
No tree or shrub which is beautiful in Winter is ugly in other seasons of the year. But there are many woody plants which may be beautiful in Spring, Summer, and Fall, but are truly repulsive to look at in Winter. Remember, flowers, no matter how treasured in Spring or Summer, are almost always vacant in winter.
When are you going to begin your Winter Garden improvements? How about starting as soon as possible? Call us at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd., at 952 933 5777.