The 2010 Minnesota spring is almost back to its normal time frame. In my grounds today’s May 18th garden usually occurs about May 26th, so now spring is only about 8 days early. Last week’s cool, cloudy and rainy weather, made the adjustment. Still, eight days of a better Spring is much appreciated.
I usually use Azalea bloom as my standard for comparing Spring’s timing.
My grounds are designed as a landscape garden….not a staged garden of flowers or lineup of shrubs one looks at ….but a space to be entered, and having entered it, the visitor becomes an indispensable part of the garden scene viewing through its countless windows and entering and exiting doors into the next sceneries.
In a landscape garden the very movement made by the visitor along the paths creates a new picture.
Some of the most beautiful and well maintained landscape gardens occur within small city grounds.
Those interested in visiting them should call Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd. at 952-933-5777 for reservations.
The landscape garden must have borders. Without privacy there is no garden, but an open field….
If the plantings aren’t arranged in some degree of harmony and reason , the collection becomes a mere display of plants rather than a landscape garden.
Words have meaning….a truth often ignored. The guide rule for creating the landscape garden is stated as 3 questions in one: “What is to be placed Where, and Why did you do that?”
It is the habit of the American homeowner and landscape designer both, to place plants by habit.
Where there is an empty space, something must fill it. Forms are memorized. Twelve plants are remembered. These twelve plants will be used again and again and again, without much care to know what they do. Without much interest in the endless numbers of those available.
