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.

December 30, 2011

Not All Minnesota Winters are Equal

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, garden seasons, winter landscapes — glenn @ 2:43 pm

Winter Twin Cities, Minnesota, 2011 has not yet arrived.   The joy is mixed with sorrow at Masterpiece Landscaping, at least from this writer’s perspective.

The Joy:  

For most of this past month, December, there has been little precipitation, meaning no snow.   For this past month I have been able to stroll along my garden paths and pretend I am working.  I always enjoy its beauty. 

 Yes, the ground is frozen which eliminates planting or transplanting/   That suits me fine.   I can resume the habit in due time when Spring truly returns.   Mine is predominantly a conifer landscape garden supported by perennials and ground covers.    It is most beautiful in winter for several reasons. 

Conifer landscape gardens are most beautiful at this time of the year either without snow or with a reasonable amount of snowfall…..unlike the November 13th deluge of snowfall of last year, 32 inches worth at my grounds, which buried nearly everything in sight but the mature pines and spruce.   This winter  with no snow, the browns, golds, and greens of the ground cover regions replace the white and add to the variety of textures, colors and forms created by those conifers of the higher tiers of plant growth.    One still sees the greens of the Alberta Spruce, bluish greens of the Holger’s juniper, the maroons of the Heatherbun Chamaecyparis, and golds of most of the yellow folliaged Chamaecyparis pisiferas.   My Rhinegold arborvitaes vary in color from a gold rust, to powdery green, depending upon the amount of exposure to sunlight.  The blues of the dwarf Colorado Blue spruce are bluer  thus far this winter.    Among the dominant trees, the green of the Eastern White pine is as pure a  green it always is. 

The Sunkist Arborvitaes are often moody about their color changing in winter.    This winter the one I prune to maintain as a shrub is still  as yellow as a Sunkist could ever be.   My major Sunkist, twenty five feet East of this ’shrub’ Sunkist  is now over twenty feet tall.  It  was artistically pruned early last Spring and is still bright yellow from growth after  its last year’s hair cut.    The five or six others I’ve planted  on the property vary from yellowish to decidedly greenish.   All will yellow brightly starting about the first of March.

The most blue of my Dwarf Colorado Blue Spruce every winter is the Seven Sisters weeper.  Most of the others,  regardless of the kind of winter, turn to a gray for winter display.

The creation or preservation of plant forms  is very important in  the ideal landscape garden.   It is hard to beat the form of so many conifers, either displayed as individuals or in groupings for harmony.   A winter without much snow is an excellent time to evaluate garden harmony.   Never will there be a time in your landscape garden when  negative space will become so widespread, and if you have planned, planted  and pruned well, so appreciated.

I and our Masterpiece garden here at my home, were severely criticised during the growing seasons last year, by my colleagues, son Chris Ray and Josh Perlich.    I happened to allow one of my favorite garden flowers, Angelica gigas….normally a six to ten footer each in height multiply from its  seed production the year earlier.     Finally, after the spectacular candelabra of floral form in August and September hiding nearly every plant in sight, I began culling and began once again to appreciate the duty  of negative space separating the beauty of plant forms.

In all, I discarded around 230 “Gigas”.   A couple dozen of this biennial, attractive in foliage, flower and form, still remain in today’s winter setting displaying their seed clusters.   They are still attractive.     I shall have to do some better old fashioned hoeing next year….all garden season long, to control ‘gigas’s’  love to live and reproduce.

The Sorrow of a winter without snow.   

If  a vital part of ones income in Winter  comes from plowing snow,  what then if there is no snow?     I’ll let your imagination take  to answer the question.

December 6, 2011

Beauty in the Bleak Season

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons, winter landscapes — glenn @ 7:39 pm

The Bleak Season at my grounds last year began  on Saturday, November 13 with a 32 inch dump of wet snow burying nearly every plant shorter than  ten  feet tall.    This  snow and a lot more following it lasted all winter long.  There was no January thaw, the first in  my memory causing drifts up to six feet making paths impassable.   The snow was so deep I couldn’t plow my body through the permasnow five feet deep where there used to be garden paths.  At one time in January while struggling along what I thought was a path, my left leg kept began to sink  into an unexpected slope causing my legs to split.   My descent was slow and gentle as if I had sunk into  bottomless quicksand.  Only my torso with its legs spread as wide one from the other as the old body would allow,  saved me from disappearing from view entirely.   My right leg stopped splitting from my left  parallel to the snowline but four feet into it.   My left leg was fixed straight into the bottomless snow dragging my body leftward and  downward.   In just a few seconds my body became imprisoned in snow as if I were in  a  full body cast waist  down.    I couldn’t move an inch in any direction.  Neither foot was holding up my body. Only snow kept me from descending deeper.   It was truly comfortable.  There was one difficulty…..except for my neck and arms, I couldn’t move a thing.   I couldn’t even use my weight to  roll downhill  to my left.   My legs were still stuck as far from one another as possible.  I laughed for a while at the picture I presented.    Soon, however, I recognized that I was in a bit of trouble.

It took me over a half an hour of digging and crawling from the snow hole I had sunk into.

One of my Woodward arborvitae globals ten by ten feet disappeared for four months only to be rediscovered in late March with a third of its foliage eaten by rodents after Vitamin C.   More damage was done in my landscape garden last winter than all of the 36 preceding winters combined.  My conifers were more mature therefore taller and some broaderand more susceptible to winter damage.    

The  Eastern White Pines planted in 1976 as 10 inch  second year seedlings are now over 50 feet tall.    I was nearly killed by one of the ten or so branches twenty five feet in length and   over six inches in diameter came crashing down as I was trying to clear snow of of the pine’s lower branches.  Its weight carried other branchings smashing to the ground as well.    There was no warning, only   four  seconds of noise as gravity grabbed its claim.  I couldn’t move.   When the snow is four to five feet deep everywhere in sight, there is little room to maneuver.    The bulk of the crashing branches  missed me by an arms length, but I was ‘pushed’ into the snow by the ‘gentle’ needles of the tree’s branchlings.

Let me warn you all.   The four seconds of that  Eastern White Pine branch plowing through the branches below taking them along to Mother Earth sounded just like a locomotive gone loco caused   a sound and heart beat I’ll never forget.

The grounds surrounding homes in our Northland are landscaped but are not landscaped gardens.  They display cookie cutter patterns usually filling spaces around the foundations of the houses and a tree in the middle of the  front yard, a conifer at one or both corners and the rest in lawn. 

Often spreader yews are place five or so in a row two feet apart somewhere along the foundation at the front of the house.   Home owners fail to realize that each of these spreader “Taunton” yews can reach  twenty feet high and twenty five feet broad in about fifteen years.  

When I was a boy, yews were rarely planted in our Twin City area.   They were not generally available at the local nurseries.   Rumors ran that they were not hardy.   In the 1960s and 70s  Bachman’s landscaping for our  Twin Cities’ front yards   was noticeably special with a worthwhile design usually  relying on Japanese yews, both spreaders and uprights.   Since then the local nursery design industry has depended on instructors trained at the University of Minnesota where they become graduates of cookie cutter designs or worse.

Visually the winter landscape dominates our grounds from November 1 to April 1 give or take a couple weeks.    We have had 10 inch snowfalls in May, folks and before the natural cyclical warming of the past half century,  snow and ice on the ground  almost always on Easter Sunday.  

Who among you would connive to make Minnesota colder every year based on fraud of  knowledge and politics?    Thank God for our little advance toward global warming.   I, and everyone in Minnesota should favor a tad more warming until we reach horticultural zone 4, St. Cloud northward and zone 5 southward to the Iowa border.   More cropland would be available for more food  production and gardeners at  Park Point along Lake Superior in Duluth,  being the warmest zone in Minnesota,  could produce quality grapes and beautiful laceleaf Japanese Maples.

Oh the envy of it all.

This Twin City winter, thus far, we have had only brushings of snow cover, perhaps three in all making my winter garden exceptionally beautiful with the fresh white covering ground and conifers.   I suppose I have several hundred feet of paths winding around my property.   When snowfall is dry and under four inches in depth, I sweep the paths so I can escape every day for a walk through its exquisite beauty. 

No garden anywhere at any time is more beautiful than a well planned and executed Northland winter landscape garden.    I prefer my grounds in Spring for the cleanliness and perfection of rebirth, its freshness,  fragrance, and color.   Best of all, I like its temperature.  

Perhaps it is the starkness of the season, the lack of variety of color, the extended length of the winter shadow, and the threat of winter itself, that adds to the beauty of the form and textures of the winter conifer garden.   And it is not without color if planned well.    Forms are better seen due to the loss of green mass which so overwhelms most settings after the second week in May.

Creative  pruning is usually seen at its best in Winter.   Sculptures whether live or manmade tend to inspire those passing  by or viewing from a window, even during winter’s   bleakest  moments.

Every one of my windows enframes a lovely  garden view from the indoors twelve months every year.   No window picture is more inspiring than those during the ‘Bleak Season”.

Winter is the time to review the condition of your home or business grounds.   If you would like to live amid more  beauty in  our Minnesota bleak season, give us a call at 952-933-5777 for an appointment. 

Landscape Gardening is classically a visual art form directing what the eye is to perceive, not merely a lineup of plants in  a row or a Silver Maple planted in the middle of the front yard designed on checkered paper.

November 9, 2011

Late Autumn Color in our Northern Landscape Garden

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, garden maintenance, garden seasons — glenn @ 3:08 pm

By habit  northerners, including  amateur and professional ‘horticulture’ oriented people  refer to color in the autumn garden as any  color but green.   Red, pink, scarlet, orange, rust, chartreuse, gold, yellow, maroon, plum….you get the idea……green is never listed.

This is mainly the  habit, monkey see, monkey do.   But there is another reason why these days greens have become so much more important in the art of landscape gardening.

Over the past twenty five years the greatest numbers of ‘new’ plants in our Twin Cities ‘north’  for use in our art form, are coniferous evergreens.   Some such as  Microbiota from Russia and Chamaecyparis from Japan, are genera which finally are available in the Twin City market.

Others are old time conifer ‘inventions’  which finally had made the Twin City market as a natural response to the greater interest in the landscape garden and an ability to pay extra  for the more unusual.

And then there are the newer ‘inventions’, new breedings and more commonly new discoveries from nature’s ‘mistakes’ all of which give us a much wider variety of colors AND sizes of green conifers…….

“Conifer”  refers to woody plants which bear cones.

At present on  this 9th of November, 2011  my landscape garden is still radiant with reds, pinks, browns, rusts, maroons, scarlets, oranges, yellows and chartreuse.   But the base for  this canvas is still green from the conifers…..from the darks of yews to  the  darks of the shade-sides of nearly any other upright green foliaged conifer, these are the plants which dominate, frame,  and define the beautiful pictures of a  classic landscape garden, not only today in late Autumn  at its colorful best, but in Winter and early Spring when their forms truly dominate the classic landscape garden.

Here is a partial list of the more noticeable sources of color in my today’s landscape  garden show in a year where there was no killing frost until evening six days ago and very little frost since:

Three Fothergilla with all colors of autumn,  three Paperbark maple trees, one brilliant yellow-gold, another blinding orange, and a third scarlet red all in full display,  two Norway maples pruned as eight foot shrubs, both orange,  two Crimson Spire oaks  viscious orange blending with rust and scarlet, and the third week of now pinkish orange of my eight by eight foot yellow leafed barberry. 

I allow the Japanese spiraeas to seed whereever they want….and then I cull when they are out of place according to my eye.   I think most of these autumn oranges are seedlings of Gumball spiraea or Anthony Waterer, or Neon.   Some are from Little Princess and remain tight foliaged and orange in fall color.    I have a number of Juddii viburnums throughout the grounds.   Besides the wonderul fragrance of its midMay blooms, these viburnums display a mass of plum to maroon to red leaf color in late autumn.

The best maroons are the more massive purple leafed smokebush especially Velvet Cloak.   Grace Smokebush is spectacularly colorful and has been for a month…..orange blending in every way to maroon.   The steadiest of the darker maroons is Black Beauty Elderberry, which in my grounds dies back to the ground every year and then recovers, sending up eight to ten foot stems…..notice the plural of this statement, please.   Every leaf is still on each of my half a dozen Black Beauties, and every leaf is the same dark purple-maroon as borne  months ago  in Spring.

The colorful conifers which provide the form and contrast of  today’s setting start with the brilliant yellow of some Sungold (King’s Gold)  Chamaecyparis, both trees and shrubs,  yet although  all essentially are the same Chamaecyparis pisifera aurea  nidiformis plants,  some have turned lime green instead.

The Andorra juniper has already turned into its winter’s plum color.

In stark contrast are those in the bluish greens…..Dwarf Colorado Blue Spruce,  Pumila Scot’s Pine, Hughes, Maneyi, Table Top, and Blue Prince  Juniper.  

The upright Japanese Yew or its Taunton ’spreader’ yew, especially if grown in summer shade, is still very, very dark green and getting darker as winter ‘falls’ on us.  Another impressive very dark green comes from the foliage of the Clanbrassiliana Spruce a dwarf of about 15 feet height at ‘maturity’. 

The Serbian spruce shows a bicolor combination of turquoise newer foliage above the older  dark green.

The conifer genus which our Minnesota gardens cannot do without is ‘Thuja”, the arborvitaes.  

Whether the tall pyramids, the spiky pyramids,  the fat uprights, the round ones, the bluish green ones, dark green or chartreuse green, the golden, or the burnt tipped orangie shrubby ones, those with spiral foliage growth and others fuzzier appearing, this genus is a god-send to  the Minnesota landscape gardener.

Most arborvitaes darken significantly as winter approaches.   Many of those with genetic yellow in them will begin to display it by the ides of March.

I have a couple Sunkist or  Yellow Ribbon planted in full sun for half day that remains as yellow  today as it was in  July.  

Growing and maintaining the landscape garden is an art form surpassed by no other in stimulating the spirit of those who create it, maintain it and display it.

Give it a try, but be patient and alert.   Give us a call at Masterpiece when you need assistance…..at 952-933-5777.

November 8, 2011

To Clean or Not to Clean…..that is the November garden question

Filed under: Plant health, battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons — glenn @ 3:57 pm

Because of this present November being exceptionally dry, pleasant, beautiful, and void of a killing frost until last Wednesday night here in the Twin Cities, landscape gardeners have been able to spend more time than usual amid their garden plants.  These following questions  arise for all of us and our answers may vary from year to year.

To water or not to water? 

Who expected the last part of October to be so dry?……and after a very dry August?   I had my watering system turned off two weeks ago, and had not watered for a week before that.   Yet, I was shocked while planting yesterday to see the soil so dry so deep into the soil.

I immediately hand watered all of the plants planted over the past six weeks…..beginning with the perennials whose root systems are much more endangered by drought.   I am able to use the sprinkler in the major portion of my landscape garden grounds, and again, watered the newer plantings as a priority.  

Overwatering could be a problem after mid August.   Many woody plants begin their winterizing shortly after the summer equinox.   This is called hardening off.   We don’t know much about the specifics regarding the vast numbers of plants now available for our grounds plantings.

We don know that watering heavily well into late autumn keeps some plants in summer growing mode.   They have not been allowed to adjust to the coming of the cold and severe, and can be killed.

About three winters ago, I lost four or five established yews, one of which was a beautiful tree.   I had never lost a yew on my grounds in 35 years of a dozen or more  plants of yew life.   Eventually, I discovered that their deaths occurred from a windy weekend in January.   There was plenty of snow, but with a temperature of ten or more below zero, and winds of twenty miles per hour over a twenty hour period, killed them.   I stayed warm  indoors that weekend day.   My yews had no place to hide.

To clean or not to clean?

This question is difficult to answer.    Fall cleaning the landscape garden is a major project in most grounds.   Size and time dictate the schedule.  Cleaning out the leaves whether from your or your meighbors’ trees makes the grounds appear, well, clean…and neat.   Lawns should be raked for their better health enduring winter.  

No one knows when the first major snowfall will occur.   Last year the tonnage was dumped over night and through the day starting on  Saturday, November 13, here in the Twin City area.   We got hit by a  35 inch heavy snow drop.   Much was damaged, but the ground never froze, because it was covered all winter long by nature’s best insulator, snow.

Plant debris and autumn leaf fall  are  typically blown to  obstacles, such as  neighboring plant stalks which entrap debris which  builds up protecting plant crowns until a sizeable  snowfall.   This is nature’s way some plants endure the rigors of an early winter.  

The real danger to our plants, whether perennials or the  more delicate woody shrubs, or sometimes even to the well established tougher reliables, is the “Test Winter”.

A test winter  is that winter in our Northland when the temperature drops to 10 to 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit before Christmas without any snow cover.   Perennials are especially vulnerable.   If you had left nature do its thing, leaf debris would have collected  around the stems of such plants for insulation.  It can also be that winter when the temperature drops to minus 30 with a driving wind which can be a real killer for many woody members of the landscape grounds not blessed with snow cover.

To weed or not to weed?  

Weed whenever you can, but remember a weed is “a plant out of place”.

I allow certain plants ‘out of place’  to grow in my grounds within limits.   Red and white oak seedlings, for example.   Both are in beautiful autumn colors….red and maroon and kept within a foot of the ground offer colorful highlights when other colors have already faded.    Pruned Ohio Buckeye seedlings can be made into  an attractive shrub.

Late autumn is an excellent time to scour the landscape grounds for buckthorn seedlings since their leaves are still green at this time.    Every year I come across a four or five foot weed tree of ash, box elder or  other maples, or elm and buckthorn or pagoda dogwood growing handsomely.   How did I miss noticing  these varmints for the past five or six years some even being in full sight as I walk by?   They blended in with the other greens nearby.

To plant or not to plant?    Late autumn isn’t the best time to plant, but survival depends on moisture available and good soil preparation.   Regardless of season, when planting woody materials, make certain that the roots are ‘loosened’, that is freed from the circular pattern forced by the pot in which the plant was housed.

Root bound plants do not have a high rate of survival if transferred from pot to grounds without freeing  up the root system.

To wrap or not to wrap young deciduous trees?

Usually one wraps these trees to protect them from the south and southwest sun during winter.    Some trees, such as young ash, apple, and crabapples, are very susceptible to sun scald, that is, the sun’s strength of warmth usually in February and early March warms up the exposed tissues during a sunny day.   Upon sunset the tissue freezes as the temperature plunges, and destroys the cells, splitting the bark on the south and/or southwest side of the tree.

Another reason for wrapping younger trees is to provide protection from rodents.   Last winter was a terrible, terrible time for trees killed by rodent’s, voles, mice, rabbits,  under the snow eating away at the young bar, girdling the tree, causing its eventual death.    Crabapples, apples, plums, even young oaks were killed.

For some reason wrapping with the corregated “Tree Wrap” confuses the varmints enought to make them forget about bark breakfasts and dinners.     If deer are in your neighborhood these late October and early November days, you know the hunting for does stags, like to sharpen their weapons on trees  up to fifteen inches in girth and your chest level.

This “Tree Wrap” wrapping seems to fool them as well….at least until I get reliable reports suggesting otherwise.

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.

October 6, 2011

Inviting Birds to Your MN Landcape Garden in October

Filed under: Uncategorized, garden seasons, perennials, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 8:49 pm

I was a ‘birder’ by age 12.   I discovered their populations during my morning paper route which included homes  at the end of my route, near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota.  

Cliffs…stone abutments….huge boulders,  woods, slopes, and torrents of water moving southward, noisily and threateningly.  It was exciting to climb and sit and observe.

What more could a paper boy  want   having delivered his papers by  5:30 in the morning with nothing around him but birds and fox, trees, woods,  and an angry river….at least in the Spring?  

I explored.    I learned some trees had different looks  besides ‘elm’.    They differed in their leaf patterns, shapes and sizes.  I had to know their names…they had to have names…..and so, went to the Groveland Park Library to find out.

The name,  Aralia spinosissima, wasn’t listed there.   It arrived at the grounds where I now live about 35 years ago when I was in my 40s….and I had never heard of it until then.

I did study Latin in high school…..I chose the class without advice or pressure.   I lucked out.  Fewer learnings have taught me a greater collection of understanding in my lifetime…..in history, the world of plants, Bible studies….and my understandings of  America, its language,  and the western world.

I shall tell the story of Aralia spinosissima’s arrival to my property in 1976 or so in another report.

Its name tells us that it is an Aralia…..that it is related closely in its ‘being’ with these relatives, the Aralias….all of whom  have similar  genetic makeup ….such as Aralia racemosa, Minnesota’s native ’spikenard’.     But this Aralia is not racemosa, an herbaceous perennial, but is a ’spinosissima’, a spiny woody perennial.  

 Its name  in Latin means the most spiny spiny thing ever.

Aralia spinosissima is well named.    Even its  leaves, double compound and  three feet long, are spiny.   

In my own grounds where it had set root, totally unbeknownst to me, and had grown among some French lilacs, its trunk was so spiny it shredded the skin off of my right arm when I reached passed it to weed where  it  touched  me as I pulled my arm away from the task.  I had assumed it was just another lilac trunk…..but where did it get its thorns?  I asked myself  staring at the bleeding.

Aralia spinosissima blooms in early September, late August at my grounds.   It grows  in full sun and,  since its dramatic entrance to my world of plants, has spread to about six trunks which have reached fifteen feet in height….about its maximum size.  It’s not a plant for limited spaces.

 I have a landscape gardened grounds….about a half acre in all,  with hundreds of varieties of plant material.   The birds collect here in vast numbers starting late August  lasting throughout much of October.  These birds are busy preparing for their southward flights.

No plants on my grounds cause more frenzy among birds  than my Aralia spinosissimas.   They swarm their meals  as  if blood were spilled  into a pond of pirranha, particularly over an hour or two after dawn.

The original bloom is a collection of  dusty white  florets in a hoop resembling a queen’s tiara, and held high at the top of its taller branches.  As it ages going into September, it become slightly pink, and then decidedly pink.   As the fruit develops at each floret, the color darkens to dark pink eventually reaching a lovely maroon…..when it announces it is ripe for the taking.  

The uneaten fruit darkens to a dark wine/purple color when it drops for rodents to finish the feast.

The foliage, resembling Green Ash from a distance, turns a bright yellow as the fruit darkens.

It is one of my favorite plants.   I can examine its floral show up close when looking out my second story windows.  I wish I could give you an accurate account of the birds who visit.   My eyes are too old to manage.   In later October there will be a weekend visit of Cedar Waxwings…..en masse, which will attack the Aralias, get drunk, and wobble for a day or two and then they flock southward.

Robins do the same….and I do know that many of our native sparrows monkey around when the fruit is ripe, but they are small and the markings are less telltale.

Aralia spinosissima is a rare breed for common gossip.  But one must allow it space.

August 29, 2011

September is Fall for Evergreen Conifers Too!

Filed under: Plant health, garden seasons, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 9:16 am

……..and this year September is arriving a bit early for my Swiss Stone Pines……the interior needles are beginning to turn yellowish. 

Autumn begins June 21st or is it the 22nd now with the beginning of the shortenning of the day.  Our Northland’s deciduous trees are already  working on cutting  off their today’s leaves.   Nearly all will be dropped by November 1st, year in and year out.

Some of us are lucky enough to grow white oaks on our property.   Many of these beauties maintain their tanned leaves all winter long.   Some Ironwoods do as well.

All of our northern conifers lose at least their oldest brand of foliage, that which is most interior  to the trunk.   This is a September affair in the Twin Cities and surroundings. 

Tamaracks, also know as Larch, are evergreens which are not really evergreens.   Their ’needles’  turn a bright yellow in September and all are discarded in a matter of a week or two.  

By the way, it is almost a crime to call Tamarack foliage ‘needles’.   The species has among the most gentle foliage to the human touch know in Nature.   The tree is much neglected in the northern landscape garden.

This year my Swiss Stone Pines seem to be yellowing in their interiors  already.  It is normally early. 

If any of your conifer trees  display yellowing foliage in June or July, you most likely have a problem with a fungal leaf blight.   Many spruce and yews are especially susceptible to such blights which attack the older needles, but permit the young to flourish for a year before they are killed as well.    Countless sickly Colorado Spruce, once proud and beautiful in its ‘blue’, stand ‘ugly as sin’ plagued by fungal disorders.    Most are treatable, but treatment tends to be long term…..especially if the spruce are located in shade.

July 17, 2011

The Week of the Hot Weather Which has been WET

Filed under: battling the Minnesota climate, garden seasons, perennials, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 8:02 pm

We in the Twin Cities landscape gardening world  have had a hot and wet several weeks following a very short Spring.  

It was only one year ago our world was blessed with one of the most beautiful landscape garden seasons I can remember…….An early Spring….warm April, cool May, and a Summer of nothing general to have worried about.   Plantings with irrigation systems did exceptionally well making plants exceptionally healthy……and then November 13, 2010 visited and dumped nearly 3 feet of wet and heavy snow at my place doing more damage to my woody plants that all of the previous 36 years of residence here combined.

Have you noticed how beautiful the Nikko Blue and Endless Summer hydrangeas have been blooming?   Their blooms are nearly all pink or paler yet, but there is a record number of blooms on each plant….Why?

We had a mild autumn in 2010  right up to the sudden enormous snow dump on November 13.  After the dump all winter long there was no thaw….in January or any other time.  The snow kept accumulating and so protected flowering plants under snow cover from bud frost, so many blooms from the previous year’s formation survived the winter freeze and became available to cause you pleasure this month.

Warmth and regular watering aids plant growth even if you have forgotten to fertilize your landscape grounds for the past decade or two.   If we would look a moment to examine  our neighborhood’s  collections of plants, they all look rather lush……warmth and regular watering will do that to most plants, both woody and herbaceous.

For those of you lucky enough to have installed a sprinkling system,  and your garden consists nearly entirely of woody plants and lawn, you might want to consider waiting for a week before turning on your system for regular watering again.   Unless your grounds in sandy or sloped severely, and unless you have a wealth of herbaceous perennials as the mainstay of your grounds. 

I have thousands of perennials growing side by side and in and about my woody plant locations both in sunny and shady areas.  (One of the many reasons I use pyramidal forms of woodies, evergreens especially in the landscape,  is they do not cause shade.   You can grow any sun demanding  plant in their midst without fear  of disease or shabby appearances or decline.)

If your landscape garden soil is sandy, try to identify a shrub that is rather tell-tale about needing watering……The PeeGee hydrangea and its ‘off spring’ and hybrids will be among the first to scream “water please” with the first drooping of foliage.   

Don’t count on getting your clues from Endless Summer, however.  It’s foliage is almost always drooping during hot sunny days whether it has plenty water of not.  

Regarding garden plant mortality, more garden plants in our Northland likely die from lack of water than all of the other plant troubles  combined.  

August 2011 should be hot but  less wet.   We can probably expect a reduction   of our heavenly water supply as winter approaches   For those of you without automatic watering systems, you would do your grounds well by watering occasionally, but regularly, reducing the actual frequency after mid August, supplying some moisture weekly until October.

Your garden’s  soil type does matter.   More frequently and regularly water sandy soils until the evening temperatures drop below 45 degrees F.     Clay soils should never be allowed to dry and harden.  

Mulches can help retain moisture regardless of soil type.

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