Masterpiece Landscaping Blog

January 25, 2012

Garden paths through the Beautiful Winter Garden of Snow Flowers

Filed under: About Masterpiece, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons, winter landscapes — glenn @ 3:36 pm

How many times  a day do you enjoy walking your garden paths?

Have you noticed how much more fulfilling these  walks are in winter than in any other season of the year?    There may be less color;  the fragrances are fewer or more hidden; the sounds are clearer in the particular, but silent in the mass, more than the other  six months of each year.  

However, in  no other  daytime can the forms of the uprights show so precisely, sharply, and meaningfully their personalities than  in this winter like ours in the Twin Cities, 2012.    They dominate undisturbed by fancy color and crowded corners, and are made so much more beautiful and so well appreciated by the negative spaces which divide them.

What a wonderful place to be  every day of your winter life in Minnesota after an inch or two of winter’s  visual ‘mannah’  from heaven.    Nearly every  conifer species displays this  lace  in its own special way.    I have been told that in Japanese  this phenomenon is called ’snow flowers’.  

Like most landscape gardeners, however much I enjoy the solitude of walking my own  gardened grounds, I feel  selfish that others so seldom see  such beauty.

One of the great enjoyments of installing such landscape gardens for our clients, is that in time, if they have mangaged their grounds properly, they, too, can enjoy this kind of selfishness and invite others to  do the same by spreading the scenery.

Of course, we at Masterpiece  would like to share our skills by developing and maintaining beautiful sceneries through which  garden paths meander.   Give us a call for a tour of a winter landscape garden at 952-933-5777 for further  information.

November 2, 2011

Why is our 2011 November landscape garden so Beautiful?

Filed under: About Masterpiece, Pruning, The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons, perennials, shrubs and trees, winter landscapes — glenn @ 1:53 pm

If you have been ‘playing’  in your landscape garden the past month you may have noticed that this October of our year, 2011, was special…..If so, why?

My grounds throughout is at its most colorful best this early November   than  in all the 37 years I have lived here in the Hopkins area.  It is a landscape garden about 1/2 acre in size, laid out over the years by my passion to create beauty in the land over which I have domain while I live.

I have noticed I have been  spending more time ‘being there’ in the garden the last few weeks than previous Octobers.   Beauty has its lure.   It sure beats drugs by anyone’s observation, I would think.  I noticed yesterday and today, I’ve been  loathe to  leave  its  beauty, so I  have been manufacturing  various tasks to  keep me here.  

These tasks are governed by the garden’s beauty.    I prune, rake, cut back some perennial foliage, clean fallen leaves from the conifers…..nothing well organized, nothing planned, simply enjoying a daily three mile walk or more walking its paths, “Being there”…..and thinking why is this year’s Autumn so special in my landscape garden?

We have had no killing frost here.   I think that’s the answer.   There have been only two evenings when the temperature dropped to 31 or 32 degrees Fahrenheit.   Statistically,  October 10th has been  the average date for killing frosts in our Twin City area.   That is nearly a month ago.

We don’t have much sunshine these days.   The maples, Ohio Buckeye, Kentucky Coffeetree dropped their leaves by  mid October.   There are no garden  shadows without sunlight.  And November is Minnesota’s most cloudy month, meaning that in the landscape garden there is no shade from the major trees by late October, except from oaks.   If there is no sunlight, there is no shade, and with no killing frost, color at ground level to small tree level is not only still displayed, but not visually  damaged.

Most of all, this color can be seen from left to right and right to left in its entirety.   No killing frost allows many garden perennials to extend their bloom, no longer  in mass but as high lights and small groups.   Their foliage, led by the chartreuse, yellow, gold, and orange of large hosta clumps throughout the grounds, many floppy, still  display a coloring never before seen in such quantity during the growing season.    Some hostas, such as   June and El Nino, are still in their summer season form and  color.  

The fire colors of the major barberries and the maroons of the colored ninebarks, velvet cloak and grace smokebushes and white oaks in the distance, and all of the seed pods, blackened dead or golden brown, the blue from late summer blooming geraniums and reds from fothergilla, my annually pruned red oak at the back door entry to my chocolate brown-red sided house is nearly beyond inspiring.

Then I walk my paths and notice a large clump of Korean lilac , whose autumn color beauty I haven’t seen for many years……a color of soft, dusty, pink, tan, rust, orange all blendings  on leaves the size and appearance  of butterflies resting enmasse on the lilac’s autumn  ’twigs’.

Yet, no matter how beautiful the colors of this scenery I have described  may be in anyone’s eyes, they are insignificant without the most important color and collection of plants to glorify the setting……the greens of our evergreen conifers, from ground covers to magnificent trees.   It is they who are now entering our Minnesota garden world dominating its beauty until mid May every year,  that command its  scenes.

Until this  week, the most inspired I have ever been by  my landscape garden was in early February some nine  years ago, at 3:30 AM in a light snowfall of large snowflakes sparkling from a full moon  peeking through the cloud cover.

I was to go to a colleague’s wedding in Hawaii…..and I thought no place in the world could be more beautiful than the scene  I was leaving.   I went to the wedding in Maui.  Everything was beautiful, but not as beautiful as that morning.

Nor is the color of today’s display, but it is its equal.

Use your own imagination, fellow Minnesotans.   What setting without color  could be as or more beautiful than this year’s extended,  special Autumn,  in Winter?  Picture it yourself.

I doubt it could be a garden scene without the beautiful forms of our Northern  conifers and silhouettes of  what they enframe on a moonlit evening graced by huge sparkling snowflakes.

The most important plants in our Northern landscape gardens are the evergreen conifers!!!

 Winter is our longest landscape season…..as long as Spring, Summer and Autumn put together.

Check out your own landscape where you live.   If you think there could be improvements, please give us at Masterpiece Landscaping a call  at 952-933-5777.   We can help solve your landscape problems.

October 30, 2011

Not all Minnesota Autumns are Equal

Filed under: About Masterpiece, Ground Covers, The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons, perennials, shrubs and trees, winter landscapes — glenn @ 8:40 pm

I spent  much of this gray  day involved in my own landscape garden.   I am loathe to call it work, for once I enter the space, I am too lost in its aura, too mesmerized  to feel any labor.    I become occupied and governed in deeds   the space has captured  me to do.

Not all autumns are equal.   In my space this October has been one of the most beautiful ever.   Traditionally in the Twin City area, the first two weeks in October will rival or surpass any two weeks in Spring for sheer beauty from color…..

In my garden world  the sugar and red maples and Ohio buckeye, the younger red and white oaks, typically  turn red or orange before October 15.    Their  leaves are gone by now,  opening forms they once hid in Nature’s shade and  mass of summer green.  The smaller notes of the garden composition, the ground covers, annuals and herbaceous  perennials flowered well  and long into the month.  Some garden phlox, lamiums,  hotlips turtlehead, goldsturm rudbeckia, fireworks solidago, the stonecrop Autumn Fire, and Johnson’s blue geranium  are still hanging on with spots of bloom, but more as highlights of color rather than sweeps.  The Ginkgo remains bright green until a heavy frost.  The next day the foliage is yellow…and the next,  it  all  drops.  

As brilliant and shocking as the color was this early October, today was ever bit its equal competitor. 

The color was made much softer from the grayness of the day, but their splashes are  far more noticeable and wide spread.     That which covers much at ground level, with the exception of the evergreen conifers,  is no longer green as earlier in the month.   Most of the  hostas, many of which are huge, explode with yellow and appear by the  scores throughout at ground level.

The most spectacular color for the past week and one or two more is the soft smoky pinkish-cinnamon, red-orange yellow leafed barberry, eight by eight feet in size, standing large  behind a dwarf turquoise  foliaged Scots pine both rising above the yellow hostas and the green pachysandra, gray green lamiums, darker green vinca, and almost black-green fall display of one of my favorite plants in the landscape garden, bronzeleaf ajuga.  These ground  covers are ‘rugs’ in the landscape garden, some to be walked on, but these listed  are to be appreciated  for their color and frangrances and color of bloom, if so endowed.  

The groundcovers mentioned are at their very best displayed  when they become relatively large rugs opening the negative spaces needed to appreciate their  forms and color contrasts with their neighbors more precisely.  

In the ideal landscape garden the eye must be controlled if captivating the visitor is to become as complete as possible.   It is your artistic goal to cause anyone who enters this sacred space of Earth, which you are learning to form, to forget from whence they came…..

Most often the person escaping will be you, its artist, and its most frequent visitor.    Beginners should realize that the more often you enter your space, there likely will come a point of no return when you become lost to your  landscape garden’s  spell.  

Losing ones self in the grounds  comes easy for a lot of guys who mow lawns.   Many love what they do, and know exactly what I am conveying in this article.  And they don’t have to know very much as long as the mower is operating properly.  

Learning the ‘rules’ of the landscape garden can be complicated for a period of time.   Except for the names of the plants, there is no new vocabulary necessary to learn.    You know the words….such as space, height, size, shape, color, rhythm, shade, texture, and so on.

Most of today’s October maroons in my landscape garden are maroon all garden season.   Velvet Cloak smokebush, Black Beauty Elderberry, Rosy  Glow barberry, Helmond Pillar barberry,  Concord barberry, Centerglow Ninebark all of which can be seen better with absence of foliage from the major shade  trees.   Northern Hilites and Dwarf Korean azaleas are in  their maroon foliage in my garden  today as well.   The  Crimson Spire Oak grown in full sun,  is on fire with scarlets, reds and oranges. The one in a fair amount of shade is still green.

Green is a an essential  color in the autumn landscape garden display.  There are so many varieties of green……as you know it is the king and queen color of God’s garden……for we  couldn’t live without  its chlorophyl.  

What is the longest landscape season in Minnesota?    When I taught classes through the University of Minnesota Extension Service, I almost always opened up the session with that very question.

Typically there were no snappy responses.from the students….perhaps thinking it a trick question.  And, indeed it was.    They couldn’t answer because they never thought of winter as a landscape season.

Shocked!  They were shocked when they learned that the landscape season, winter, is equal to all other landscape seasons….fall, spring, and summer…..combined in our  Twin City area.

My next question followed thusly:   If winter is the longest landscape season in our Minnesota year, what are the most vital trees for Minnesota’s landscape beauty?

Silence…..until, typically someone shouted out “pines”!

Well, not exactly, but I  knew that  ’pine’  among Minnesota home owners means …..”pine,  plus  spruce, hemlock, yew, juniper, arborvitae, fir, microbiota, and chamaecyparis”,,,,,, in other words, the northern  evergreen conifers.

Normally, sometime  in mid October these magnificent evergreens, their  large shrubs to medium sized trees to the giants, Norway Spruce,  Colorado Spruce, Scots and White Pine rise from the summer’s green to dominate our grounds for six months until mid May when in a week or so the lace of  deciduous green begins to cover most of our gardened state in cycle once again.

The conifer ground covers and spreaders and small  shrubs   add greens of all shades;  gray green, dark green, lime green,  turquoise, and chartreuse.  Some turn plum color for the winter, yet others such as the ‘Red Cedar’ juniper and microbiota, brown. 

Most evergreen conifers darken as they enter winter.  Yet, I have a Chamaecyparis tree which remains yellow all winter,  while  other same chamaecyparis turn  chartreuse.   Shade, soil, genetics,  the regularity of moisture, one, all, or none of the mentioned , probably  have some bearing on color control from season to season.

If you are a Minnesota homeowner and your house has some space available for plantings, please do consider a landscape garden as an art form for your enjoyment.   Give us a call Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd….952 933 5777  if you are interested in joining a tour of landscaped gardens in the Twin City area……..spring, summer, fall,  and the big daddy of them all in these parts, WINTER.

June 3, 2011

Masterpiece Garden Visits Extended

Filed under: About Masterpiece, The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons — glenn @ 8:13 am

It is always the case that beautiful gardens must be seen most often at their very best……for the year, anyway.

In Minnesota, today’s garden quickly disappears into another piece of scenery never again to be seen in the form and beauty just witnessed.   The Sun, the light of our landscape garden stage, thank heaven, never stops  featuring Earth’s exquisite beauty or squalor, for that matter.

Gardens, like people, gain character with age.

Our 2011 Minnesota version of Spring is somewhat unusual or ‘old-fashioned’, some would claim.  It has been short, rainy, cloudy, threatening and cool.    Such combinations from the ordinary rearrange the times plants show their best……which almost always is in Spring when every living plant in resurrected into a renewed form.

In our Masterpiece Landscape Garden at 14624 Woodhill Terrace in Minnetonka, more color is peaking in a shorter time period.   Usually the maximum color and form of the new Spring occurs the last weekend in May.   And so, we opened the grounds to visitors.   But we missed this peak by a weekend.

Barring hail, tornado or tsunami, the grounds will be at their most beautiful EVER this weekend, ie., tomorrow and Sunday.   Please come and visit.  Hours open to the public will be from 11am to 5pm on Saturday, June 4th and Sunday, June 5th.

Instructions to the location are explained in the previous blog article.   Thank you….see you this weekend.   glenn

August 13, 2010

What Catalogs Don’t Tell Us About Mature Conifer Plant Sizes

Filed under: About Masterpiece, garden maintenance, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 5:06 pm

I am looking at a nursery wholesale catalog….a guide which carries a paragraph or less to inform the unknowing a bit about the nature of the plant.  Information located there is made available by a number of sources.  It could be from the original plant propagator, a plant salesman, or a university professor in the horticultural department.

In the landscape architect’s world knowing names of individual plants is seldom important, except perhaps for billing.  Plants are know as “green statements”, or color statements……a tall statement…..or something ‘broad’.  

I happen to like arborvitaes and have often claimed to classes which I have taught, that it is the plant genus the Minnesota landscape garden could not do without.  

There are dozens of cultivars and varieties of arborvitae….(Thuja).

In my wholesale catalog I notice that the height of the Degroot’s arborvitae, one of my favorite evergreen uprights,  is stated at six feet with a width of two feet.  Height 6′, width  2′…..and that is it. 

I am looking at one of my many Degroot’s arborvitaes in my own landscape garden, one about twelve years in my possession which was about 3 feet tall when I planted it.  I am also reminded of the three or four magnificent specimens Masterpiece planted at a Riviera Road property in Sartell, Minnesota in the mid 1990s, all of them two and a half feet wide but now over twenty feet tall.

There seems to be some problem in communication here.

Why the discrepancy?

One, and a good answer, may be that no one really knows how tall a Degroot’s arborvitae might reach under ideal circumstances.   There are so many new conifer cultivars now on the market, no one has yet seen some of them as mature specimens.   

Chamaecyparis are relatively new to the Minnesota landscape plant market.   The most popular one is sold as “King’s Gold” or “Sun Gold” which closely resembles an arborvitae.   They are sold as shrubs.   

 I open my wholesale catalog to the “Chamaecyparis, King’s Gold”  page, and I am informed that the plant upright size is one to two feet and its width is 3 feet.   No further information is offered.   The purchaser, whether home owner or professional landscaper, or someone somewhere in between might not know that if a King’s Gold Chamaecyparis were left alone to grow well on a favorable site, it would become a fifteen to twenty foot tall, conifer tree with drooping foliage about eight to nine feet wide.

It is sold as a shrub for a number of reasons…..One can sell twenty shrubs of a cultivar to every tree form of that cultivar, and Chamaecyparis are slow growing.  Even though it is genetically destined to become a small tree, regular pruning can keep its size to around six or seven feet in height. 

Another example of misinformation or lack of information  usually goes with selling the Japanese Yew.   There is a spreader variety…..labeled “Taunton”, and an upright  called “Capitata”.   If neither are ever pruned, and  allowed to grow to maturity under good conditions, both will become huge…..if twenty five feet wide and twenty five feet tall would count as huge. 

The Taunton Yew is one of the most common conifers used in  foundation plantings.   One of its best features is that it not only tolerates shade including deep  shade, it flourishes in shade.  

On one property of a regular client of ours in a space of about 30 square feet in the front area of this beautiful house, there were planted 16 Taunton Yews by the Landscape Architect.   In time one plant could have covered the entire space.  To be understanding of the Architect or Landscaper, most homeowners don’t have the patience to wait fifteen years for the full character this wonderful conifer could develop. 

One of my favorite landscape trees for the Twin City scene is the Sunkist Arborvitae or  its identical twin called Yellow Ribbon Arborvitae.  Both are ’scheduled’ to reach 8 feet tall and three feet wide.  Since that is all the information catalogs offer, one assumes that that is its mature size.

It is a wrong assumption.    Three of the Sunkists on my own grounds are all over fifteen feet tall and the king of the hill in the front garden is over eight feet wide.   I prefer them to have foliage to the ground so you can see theydo take up some space which the catalogs did not include.

I have good soil and an effective irrigation system.  Both add tremendously to the healthful growth of the vast majority of trees if not all. 

If reliable watering is not available for arborvitaes, they will not reach such heights.  Generally, many of the junipers hardy in our area are more tolerant of some drought and somewhat poorer soil.  But when on good soil, fertilized and watered properly, many, both upright and spreaders are shocking (and very beautiful) in the size they  can reach. 

My favorite upright Juniper is the Hetz Columnar.  Height size is listed in catalogs as fifteen to twenty feet.  If  planted in good loamy soil and  its location is in full sun and is regularly watered, Hetz Columnar can reach double that listed height in  ten to twelve years.

A beautiful spreading juniper is Hughes.  It is marked as six feet wide and only a foot tall, which makes it  seem like a modest ground cover…..for full sun as the catalog informs its reader.  Most, if left to grow unencumbered in to space, will surpass fifteen feet in diameter and reach only two feet in height in its normal life span. 

We seldom see these beautiful conifers in their full size.  In the future perhaps those who write statistics for catalogs will  provide more accurate  information about the  adult  sizes of these woody plants, so the consumer or the consumer’s representative can make better choices for the home grounds.

July 24, 2010

Marian and Larry Fischer of Waseca; Beautiful Garden Winners in 2009

Filed under: About Masterpiece, The Art of Landscaping, garden maintenance — glenn @ 11:12 pm

We at Masterpiece are very proud of our friends in Waseca, Marian and Larry Fischer, Star  Tribune Beautiful Garden winners a year ago.  Their landscape garden dwarfs mine in size, spreading about 3 acres in all.   It  is exquisitely maintained and manicured.   The setting is truly an oasis in a beautiful endless ”sea”  of corn.  

We have been very blessed to have had the opportunity to work together with Marian and Larry to develop the grounds over the years.  I am jealous of its beauty.

It is one form of landscape garden art to create the forms of the grounds…that is, answering the 3 questions in one, “ What goes where and why?”  

 It is yet another landscape garden art to maintain the beauty of the grounds.  

The following article was written by Kim Palmer, a reporter with the StarTribune writing the the Home and Garden section.  You can read the entire article and view the video at the StarTribune website…December, 2008 in the Home and Garden section.

From an interview with the Fischers, Ms. Palmer writes:

“I think I was born to be a gardener,” Marian said. “I’ve loved flowers and nature since I was a child.” Growing up on a dairy farm in Iowa, the oldest of seven children, nature was her escape from the clamor of a busy household. “I like peace and quiet,” she said. “Outside it was quiet.”

When she and Larry had children of their own — two sons — she raised them to savor the natural world as she had. “I would not let them sit in the house, even when they were young,” Marian said. If they wanted to watch Saturday-morning cartoons, they had to do it in a “wired” treehouse. “So at least they were outside.”

The strategy apparently worked; both sons are now gardeners themselves, and they and their friends congregate at the farm every fall for a big Oktoberfest, featuring a barn dance, bluegrass band and apple-pressing. “We are blessed with so many wonderful young people in our lives,” Marian said.

From field to woodland

From the beginning, Marian had a strong sense of what kind of landscape she wanted. Adding trees, for windbreak and shade, was a top priority. “I’m not into this restored prairie thing,” she said. “I was a child of the prairie, having spent so many hours in the hot, sticky field. I’ll go visit a prairie, but I don’t want to re-create one. I prefer shaded woodland.”

But she was still searching for ways to create the beauty that she thirsted for, even as others were starting to take notice of the Fischers’ efforts. In the mid-1980s, the couple’s garden was included on a tour as part of the Minnesota Horticulture Society’s convention. Little did Marian know that she was about to meet a mentor who would have a profound impact on her and her garden. Before the tour, the society’s director at the time, Glenn Ray, owner of Masterpiece Landscaping, came to preview their garden. Later, she went to hear him speak. “He talked about the fragrance of the lilac, and he said it with such passion,” she recalled. “Fragrance is really my thing.

A few years later, when she was on a mission to make her landscape more interesting during the winter months, she remembered Ray, looked up his phone number and asked if he did consulting, which he did. Marian has vivid memories of his first critique. “He said, ‘Why did you plant everything in straight rows?’ I said, ‘I’m German. I grew up on a farm.’”

She soon decided that Ray had the aesthetic sensibility she needed to lift her gardens to a new level. “I am a gardener. Glenn is an artist. It was obvious to me that he had what I didn’t.”

So she started hiring him every year, to refine her garden and do some of her pruning. One year, she showed him a heavily wooded area where farmers had been piling boulders for decades. “Glenn said, ‘You have a gold mine!’” Marian recalled.

That was the beginning of the dry streambed, a project four years in the making. Ray considers it “the jewel of her garden.”

The Fischers and their sons remember, and still laugh about, the painstaking process of building it. “Glenn is really fussy about the position of boulders,” Marian said. “He could spend an hour on one boulder, turning it this way and that, then say, ‘Sorry, that boulder isn’t going to work.’”

Early in their partnership, she followed his advice to the letter. “I don’t argue with Glenn. I would limit my horizons if I did,” she said.

But over the years, she has gotten bolder and more outspoken, she said. She’s redesigning one of her gardens now to reflect more of her own aesthetic. “We’re remaking this into a Marian garden rather than a Glenn garden,” she said. “I want flowers and beauty. He wants structure and form. We’re working on it.”

Ray doesn’t mind. In fact, he’s gratified to see her inner artist emerge.  “She’s a wonderful student.  When I met her everything ws in lines and squares.  She had no confidence artistically.  Now she’s part of telling me what she does and doesn’t like.  She’s developed an eye.”

Comment:  I think those who know me agree, even if painfully, that when I say, “I get as much pleasure from teaching about Landscape Gardening as I do about installing one”, it is true.

They know one lights me up as much as the other.   Sometimes they have to endure both at the same time.   My colleagues and friends are usually very forgiving, though.    And Thank God.

June 20, 2010

Classical Landscape Garden Open For Public View

Filed under: About Masterpiece, The Art of Landscaping — glenn @ 8:34 pm

Our home grounds at Masterpiece is a classical landscape garden…..One enters its realm to retire from the present time and world.  With every move forward into the gardened grounds there are windows to view distant arrangements  and grand paintings to admire. 

One is magnificently alone among Nature in its ideal.  Not the  only  ideal, but one of an endless possibilities for the ideal. 

The sunny setting provides sharp colors and bright contrasts.   The temperature falls 15 degrees when entering the shade rooms.   

The structure of the massive appearing grounds is built mostly with coniferous evergreens which, of couse, provide extraordinary beautify and suggestion of life in the dead of a Minnesota winter.   The lure of each trail comes from the distant views of beautiful forms seen through nature’s window.  The eye has been captured by each setting.  One forgets time.

Captured too are the fragrances flowing mysteriously from someplace just around the corner or perhaps close to the ground itself. 

A weed is hard to find, for almost every plant has its place. 

Every day becomes a new season….new colors are found, forms change, the sun’s spot light never quite the same and sometimes appears lost forever.  Every day demands a new visit…..to see another new canvas of beautiful arrangements.  Forsythias yield to azaleas and rhododendrons.  Azaleas and rhododendrons yield to redbuds, viburnums, and early peonies.   This Spring’s garden as seen, is lost forever.

Spring not only refreshes and resurrects the garden’s population, it is the most beautiful time for color in the Minnesota garden.  Yet, more important than color in the Minnesota garden….more enticing and  more subtle  is the beauty of form…….Nature’s sculpting of beautiful shapes, textures, and the spaces inbetween the  objects  make the garden appear a dream world.

Form is the most vital artistic element  of  the Minnesota winter setting when color is essentially absent or significantly subdued.   THERE IS NO WINTER GARDEN IN OUTDOOR WINTER MINNESOTA WITHOUT CONIFEROUS EVERGREENS.  And perhaps the most important coniferous evergreen genus is the  arborvitae…..Thuja…… with all of its countless cultivars and varieties.  Unfortunately, most are favored in winter by our Virginia White Tail deer as well.

No plant which is beautiful in winter is ugly in summer.   Countless plants in the typical Minnesota display garden rather than a landscape garden, are either ugly in winter or appear dead or disappear entirely for the season.  The annual and perennial flower garden are not in view for six months of every Minnesota year.

Occasionally, garden artists must admit, a dead appearing oak or Kentucky Coffeetree in winter  can offer a striking silhouette in the distance. 

During the month of June on each Friday from 3 PM to 6 PM the Masterpiece home garden will be open to the public for a guided tour.  Come and see for yourself……Call 952-933-5777  to sign up.

May 18, 2010

What Is Put Where, and Why?

Filed under: About Masterpiece, The Art of Landscaping, garden seasons — glenn @ 9:46 pm

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.

May 27, 2009

Welcome!

Filed under: About Masterpiece — josh @ 8:23 am

Welcome to the Masterpiece Landscapers’ Blogsite, the conversation channel primarily for clients and friends and potential clients of Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd.

We at Masterpiece will supply timely information which hopefully will help readers improve their landscaping skills, knowledge of plants, and love for the classic art of landscape gardening.  Readers will supply us with appropriate and timely questions, and hopefully will share with us some of their landscaping experiences.  Together, all of us at Masterpiece  believe we will help create a more beautiful and healthier environment for ourselves, our neighbors, and for the communities where we live.