It snowed here last Thursday evening. We had only 8″ here in my territory, two-thirds of an acre just west of Hopkins, Minnesota.
By sunset yesterday, if the sun had been seen while setting in the rain, there was still some unmelted snow in the woodsier part of my grounds. Looking down from my office window as I write this note, I still see a portion of last December’s snowdfall on the north side of the cul de sac ending at my front garden.
Today is Easter Sunday, always a church morning for the first twenty years of my life, long before the international fraud called global warming was concocted at the United Nations a few years ago. To remind readers, the fraud is not “global warming” as has been recorded over the past several generations. Our Mother Earth’s northern hemisphere has been dramatically cooling for the past 700 years. Locally, we goopherland folks have enjoyed warmer and longer growing seasons recently.
The United Nation’s fraud noted as “global warming” and been changed to “climate change”… since the globe is actually NOT warming. The scare is a political strategy to tax the West, that is ‘white man’s culture’ for its inventiveness over the past centuries and therefore a drive to make working Americans share your American earnings with the rest of the world.
If Americans do not do so, and to boot don’t stop their inventiveness, the United Nations story line goes, the Earth will ‘climately’ collapse in a ball of heat in 30 years or less according to United Nations computer readings…..unless you vote for ‘global cooling’ folks.
This past winter of snow and cold lasting to this very week was typical of the winters of my first twenty years of life. Easter Sunday’s April then was always windy and cold, displaying a landscape filled with crusty ice and snow with patches of muddy sod exposed perhaps on the south side of white-painted houses.
And then arrived glorious warming, admittedly usually in bits and pieces, the next sixty years of my life allowing me to enjoy the fruits of this magnificent global warming throughout every part of my gardened grounds, Minnesota, USA.
Raised churched and American, I was programmed to be grateful, and at age 80 I am exceptionally grateful for today’s sun and warmth despite its late arrival in our year, 2014.
Accompanying the past winter’s cold and snow came the winds….and, to quote Shakespeare, “therein lies the rub”…..the ‘rub’ causing so much of the brown on so many of our so-called ‘evergreens’.
Some of the brown especially if covering the entire normal ‘green’ of your conifer might indicate that the tree or shrub is already dead.
BUT….maybe not. It is likely in the majority of cases that last year’s new ‘leaf’ growth has been damaged, but not this year’s growth buds….SO REMAIN PATIENT for a few more weeks.
Even though most conifers of tree form have a precise fixed form of growth, do not automatically remove a still living, but winter-damaged conifer, especially one located in a quality location. Forms can be manipulated. Artistic pruning may be in order to take advantage of the ‘scars’.
After all, landscape gardening is supposed to be an art form…..not a habit called ‘maintenance’.
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