If you and I were to walk up and down the sidewalks of the city or streetsides of suburbia, it is likely we could give a pretty good listing of the personalities of the homeowning folks who live there.
Many years ago I taught landscape classes at the University of Minnesota’s Extension Service. For the winter landscaping class, we added a bus tour to drive along many communities to tell my story about the art of landscape gardening as practiced in urban Minnesota.
To tell the truth, readers, the story wasn’t and isn’t terribly inspiring. The scenery often wasn’t that much to look at. So I picked out a wide variety of settings……one of the most quieting and lovely was the setting in Minneapolis at Red Cedar Lane.
People neglect their grounds. Typically, they hire a landscape company or college kid, there’s often little difference, and they place and dig in plants by the numbers a child might draw. Folks can understand lining things up and putting them in circles. Rumor has informed them that uneven numbers are better in the garden than even numbers…..how is that one for understanding? Homeowners were once told that everthing had to be balanced…….
Then, twenty years ago, as now, most people displayed their grounds as if the grounds are a burden…..in the way. Today, where lawns are cared for, they are more beautiful than ever.
“I don’t have time to garden”, is a frequent comment, so the “I” will hire some “turkey” (as we used to say in the days of yesteryear when Americans were more polite) to drive up in a dump truck and unload twenty five tons of river rock or trap rock to cover the grounds to reduce “weeding”.
During our tours we would observe some home fronts without ever discovering where the entry door was….or if there were any windows nearby. There was so much evergreen growth, it was certain no one had touched anything outdoors for several decades.
As a generalization one is roughly what ones grounds look like. Neat? Messy? Tight? Loose? Meticulously developed? Dog poop along the front entry walk?…..with a pit bull daring a visitor to approach? House painted purple with pink stars around the front door?
In one neighborhood a gal displayed bed springs with plants growing amid the wire…..all in the front yard.
Most landscapes are simply designs made as if by cookie cutters. If maintained neatly, they could avoid being unpleasant…….but, let’s face it, Minnesota-America, the landscape grounds as a tastful art form where we live is generally………..
PRETTY BAD THEATER! But, at least more people are spending a lot more money for this theater than ever before!
At least in order to see BAD theater, one has to buy a ticket……Most everyone has to look at bad landscaping whether one wants to or not.
One sees less of that “detachment” from the outdoors these days.
Today, there are at least twenty plants to every one available for garden use just thirty years ago. Perhaps the area where the most dramatic changes have taken place providing for a new look is the number of dwarf and semidwarf evergreens as well as countless new colorful “evergreens no available to help you live in a beautiful setting.
If your home does not have an inspiring and/or beautiful landscaped grounds, feel some comfort in knowing that the landscaped grounds of almost all of the most expensive newer homes of the past twenty years, is pretty attrocious……take a tour to see for yourselves.
Look at the magazine and other pictures of “upper crust”, newer houses and examine their landscape grounds. The only tour they would show for often would be the tour to demonstrate what went wrong.
Our society is lucky, however, in the fact that most of our families do live in areas which possess an out doors……unlike Europe. If a population never spends time tending plants outside where the sun shines or doesn’t shine, where the rains fall hard or hardly fall, where shadows occur and weeds grow and the birds sing, one might believe in the fraud we here that Carbon Dioxide is a pollutant.
Only indoor people could fall so low.
Many lessons are learned every day from the experience of caring for ones home grounds. The more beautiful they become, the more care is given because good people generally like to take care of beautiful things.
Beautiful plants are countless in number. They often become more beautiful in settings one with another and another or can grow to be admired as sculpture.
Call us at Masterpiece Landscaping, 952-933-5777, and sign up for guided tours of selected lovely landscaped grounds here in the Twin Cities.
Would you enjoy living in your house if it consisted of only one room? Bathroom, kitchen, bedroom, children’s rooms, t.v. rooms all removed so there would be only one room to the house.
Many, if not most homeowners in our metropolitan area, if they “live” outside ever at all, they live only one vast room, or in two rooms…….the front and the back…..not much of a lure to see a world of life out of doors.