Masterpiece Landscaping Blog

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.

July 18, 2010

What Is This Thing Called “Weed”

Filed under: garden maintenance, perennials, random fun — glenn @ 4:33 pm

No, not the stuff the foolish  smoke!  The stuff  that grows where folks don’t want the stuff to grow.

To the Landscape Garden artist there is only one definition for the word, “weed”…..

A Weed is a Plant Out of Place!       That is the definition, the whole definition,  and nothing but the definition……to the Landscape Gardener.

In my landscape garden the plants out of place most everywhere are tree seedlings….sugar maples, red maples, elm, Ohio buckeye, buckthorn, box elder, Norway maple, Green Ash,  Red Oak, White Oak, American Arborvitae, Japanese Yew, Red Cedar, and so on and so on.  Then there are the herbaceous perennials which can be weedy, weedy, weedy no matter what the definition might be. 

In my garden I cherish one of these weedies…..the progeny from my Purple Cats Astilbe.

I have an underground irrigation system to water my plant world.  I realized early in my gardening life that astilbes demanded a moist environment.   I never thought for a moment that meant reliable waterings from an underground irrigation system. 

Where I once had one clump of Purple Cats Astilbe, I now have, perhaps, thousands of its seedlings.  The color isn’t quite there, but these reliable perennials are as big if a bit more pink that purple, a replica of its parents.  They are everywhere, and at the moment, they are in full bloom. 

I weed out only those which defy harmony.   I know there will be a problem in the future.  For each new hundred clumps  established each year, what will happen to my grounds in five more years.

I have a very small area of my landscape garden in  lawn.  Nine minutes worth to be exact.   The only other routine demand is managed automatically…..the watering for fifteen minutes a zone, every other day program. 

The rest of the grounds is an open door for any and all plant visitors to set up shop……where there is room, however.   Many plants are fussy about where they will do their thing.  I have been trying to get my ginkgo to produce for years and have succeeded with only two and both are rather moody about growing much.

I have Virginia Creeper growing.  Until about August first, mature  and happy Virginia grows about three feet a day and in several directions at the same time.  I call Virginia weedy, but not a weed.  I am the one who decides where Virginia can live and flourish.  Yet, pound for pound, no other species has been removed from my property over the past 36 years except perhaps for the exception of an 90 year old American Elm I had removed last Thanksgiving Day weekend.

I find the Creeper a great ground cover in some locations, and an attractive accent in foliage in others.  I never let the plant crawl up the trunks of trees, if I can help it.   That looks messy.

If one does have grounds fairly well designed naturalistically, there are other “weedies” which make good ground covers more restful to manage…..violets come to mind….cushion and chameleon spurge are good,….

 Japanese anemone is bound to be successful despite your moods.  In Latin is named, Anemone robustissima.   That should tell the interested gardener all that is needed to know.  The “issima” part can be translated to mean….”the very, very, very most!”

It the plant were the very, very, very most in height, the plant would likely have been named,  Genera “altissima”……referring to its altitude.

You can put it together, dear reader.   Expect Anemone robustissima to enjoy its stay in your garden.  Fortunately for all, it is a very attractive for a “robustissima”.

There are many plants who do enjoy “taking over” in the grounds.  And there are some weeds far worse than others, because no one can control them.

Among such weeds, Campanula  rapunculoides leads the list.  Another is Goutweed, the socalled perennial Snow on the Mountain.  As a large group  the grasses, especially lawn grasses can be killers in the perennial garden.  That is why timely and proper edging the perennial garden border from the lawn is very important.

Most weeds can be pulled out easily by hand.  I have always liked “weeding”.  It is so resrfull and uncomplex.   One simply reaches out, grabs on to the stem at its nearest to the ground, and pulls.

If the landscape garden is beautiful before weeding, imagine how clean and sharp it will be after weeding.

But, never forget that a weed is a plant out of place if you are a person so fortunate in life to have found the art of landscape gardening.

July 1, 2010

The Importance of Being Artificially Watered

Filed under: Plant health, The Art of Landscaping, garden maintenance — glenn @ 9:21 pm

We at Masterpiece Landscaping install grounds irrigation for the landscape garden.   

Nearly all of the folks trained to install irrigation systems know nothing about installing  such systems in the classical landscape garden.

What is the difference?

Imagine a half acre of lawn.  Only lawn….nothing but lawn; no maple trees here, arborvitaes and pine there, viburnum and magnolia, anemone and heuchera, sedum and “Hot Lips” turtlehead in sight.  Only lawn, with or without dandelions. 

Here installantion is simple and quite cheap.    Installation of irrigation into a landscape garden is often much more complex, primarily depending on the placements of the tree and shrub material.

If your dream is to create landscape beauty for your home or business grounds, plant your masterpiece first.  Let the irrigation follow the art, never the reverse, art following the irrigation system……unless, of course, you have no choice.

My family and I moved to my “landscape” canvas in Minnetonka where I still live, on January 1, 1974.   Immediately with the coming spring,   The grounds  “yard”  was almost entirely lawn.   I began at certain edges around the property to develop the privacy required for a landscape garden.   At that time I was heavy into pyramidal arborvitaes.  They were cheap, grew rapidly, and didn’t cause any shade.   Besides the foliage is very fragrant.  Moreover, I was sculpting my winter garden as well.  (None of the originals have survived to this day…..a result of a disastrous winter storm.)

Once established, arborvitaes (there are dozens and dozens of varieties) can tolerate the Twin City swings of water to drought quite well.   Holding on to money while raising a family was not as easy, so I never dreamed I could ever reach the patrician heights of owning a first class irrigation system for my landscape garden.  

I had it installed in 1990, but did not start to use it until  four or five years later….let’s estimate 1995. 

At that time my grounds already had sufficient structure and design to qualify as a “landscape garden”……but, barely, compared to its today’s form.   Yet, the grounds were generally attractive, but not melodious, not harmonizing, not grand.

“Gardens like people gain character with age” I have always reminded my landscape garden students.   My garden at age  twenty or so had not yet reached maturity.  Nor had its artist in so many respects. 

By 1998, by then three years into its water irrigation life, nearly everything within the grounds where the regular, reliable water reached appeared lush.

Today, no one, including me, is more astounded at the lushness of greenery  at every corner of these grounds.  And to taunt those of you who have not yet made this wise investment into  irrigating your own garden plants I do admit I face a new problem ever since regular watering became a way of my garden plants……

Astilbes have become a major weed  here. ( if you think with the traditional meaning of  weed…some plant showing up in your grounds which you didn’t plant and you feel you have to pull it.)  I have thousands, I do believe, from the fifty or so I have planted here in my life time.  Some are growing on logs.

 

But I am a staunch believer that “a weed is a plant out of place”.   By now the majority of plants on my landscape garden grounds are volunteers which I have artistically accepted into my family of plants which I enjoy being among.

Nothing has made my trees and shrubs  more healthy appearing, more rich and lush….and, yes, more beautiful than the introduction of artificial watering to my landscape garden.

P.S.  I no longer kill my favorite perennials while dragging a hose around for advantageous placements for watering.  I had learned to hate the garden hose.  Now we are more tolerant of each other.

Give us a call at Masterpiece Landscaping, 952-933-5777 to schedule your irrigation installation quote.

August 21, 2009

Weeding in the Rain

Filed under: garden maintenance — glenn @ 9:47 am

A weed is a plant out of place.  Goldenrod is not a weed, unless it is out of place.  Elms, maples, basswoods, and Ohio buckeyes can be beautiful trees, but they are major weeds in the garden as seedlings because they are out of place.

Many oak seedlings in my garden are not necessarily out of place.  I often let them grow for several to many years, especially if they are white oak seedlings…in my view the most beautiful large deciduous shade tree in Minnesota.  Over the years I can always decide if and when these “oaklings” become weeds.

I enjoy weeding.  It is harder every year to manipulate the body in as many directions as it used to be, but I try.  Weeding causes the weeder to view garden plants up close.  One can better see individual plants amid  neighbors.

The best time to weed is after a three day rain such as we have experienced in the Twin City area this week.  The ground is deeply moistened…dandelions don’t have a chance.  Yesterday, I weeded alone at a client’s grounds made beautiful by the homeowner’s  arrangement of evergreens, but plagued with weeds big and small, volunteers and those  planted by mistake.

Some plants are by habit called weeds.  Others are wonderfully weedy, but not really a weed,  for they almost are never out of place.  They just spread and occasionally must be, well, contained.   A good example is evening primrose.  My Minnesota garden would never be without evening primrose, “Oenothera fruticosa.”

Evening primrose likes garden life, so it enjoys enlarging its space.  It will grow and bloom in nearly any manner of light, soil, and average moisture without any interference from the gardener.  One will always know where the plant is, for it hides nothing underground as does  horrible weeds such as Creeping bellflower or Quackgrasses.  When one sees evidence of their presence in the garden, it should be understood the real evil is already running all over underground looking for other perennials to hook up with.   The results are not at all pretty.

Yesterday, with the moistened Earth, I pulled over two dozen huge, deep rooted, mature dandelions and got every one of them, root and all.  What pleasure.  (Such joy must be similar to the enjoyment our local feral cat feels after cleaning our gardens of chipmunks, and rabbits, except, unlike some “nature” people, I don’t eat dandelions.)

I control weeds in my small lawn area with fertilizer plus type grass “food” applications.  Otherwise, I have not used other plant killers in my landscaped garden.  I do alot of pulling while I enjoy my stroll along the  garden paths.