Masterpiece Landscaping Blog

January 31, 2012

The Delivery of a Fawn

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping — glenn @ 6:10 pm
   I just now came across this beautiful video of one of God’s beauties  of life, the Delivery of a Fawn.     It reminded me of one of the most inspiring sights of my life some fifteen or twenty years ago which occurred in my own home landscape garden one Spring.

As you know, I am by profession, a landscape gardener.    I  have planted and nursed a beautiful setting  on my homegrounds since I and  my family  moved  here in 1974.   

One morning that decade or two    ago  shortly after dawn,  I was walking along a path slightly downhill rather dreamily   to a pond to  plant some perennials along its  path.   It was a dead quiet time of a gorgeous Minnesota  morning.

I heard  a  srange noise…..a kind of a whine,   a ‘hhheeeeeeeheeee’ to my left.   

Wow!  Here, nearly next to me was this full grown doe standing  among some shrubs blending into the scenery  without moving a muscle!   She was holding her ground!   

I was shocked!….. She repeated her noise, and again  didn’t retreat and run off  as would always be the deer habit on my grounds.  

She was looking to my right and appeared more puzzled than afraid.    And then I spied what caused her not to run.    Still mostly in its placenta sac, lying among the garden leaves, was this peculiar object poking and poking.  

I have never talked to this particular  kind of  deer before, except to yell, “SCRAM….GET OUT OF HERE!” when one  would chew on my yews.    This meeting was different.    I appologized out loud profusely to her, and slowly backed up along the path on which  I had arrived.

I was afraid she might abandon ‘the thing’.    That  this was a fawn poking around, was clear.  But to me,  it was still  ’a thing’.  

 I backed up to snoop  from behind a small oak, to see  what  ‘mom’ would do.

I was thrilled as she became calm and slowly moved toward her ‘baby’.    She chewed away the remaining sac and began licking its content which was still poking its legs here and there.  

In a few minutes ‘the thing’   stood up and wobbled  just as you see it on the video.    Mom licked a bit more as baby moved left and then right.   After another few minutes baby, now fawn,  started looking cocky and proud, and after a nudge from mom’s nose…..they took off together through my grounds  as if they had been friends  for years.  

Click below:

http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/adorable-newborn-baby-deer/1jrab2kry?q=Deer&rel=msn&from=en-us_msnhp&form=msnrl

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 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.

September 29, 2011

The Trouble with Trees

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 11:40 pm

What is a ‘tree’ to the general Minnesota  public?   

Most people would not think of defining it, answering something like “a woody perennial plant usually of fewer than five upright stems”. 

If asked, most people will answer, “an elm”…..or “a maple” or ‘oak’…..not thinking that a White Pine and Colorado Spruce are also trees.    So is a redbud and a pagoda dogwood, and even a winged euonymus, which is usually sold as a shrub at your local nursery.

The golden chamaecyparis, now becoming popular at the local Twin Cities nurseries are sold as shrubs, but in reality are trees.   The same is true of  global techny arborvitaes.   If you don’t believe me, never prune these ’shrubs’ and discover their natural size  for yourself.

Most Oaks, Maples, even Ash and  the  Elm are huge trees in our state but become punier as  reliable annual rainfall declines.

Among the most common mistakes made when Minnesotans landscape their home grounds is the choice of tree  they select…..and forgetting that they might not need a huge shade tree to tower 50 feet or more  above any house in view.

Most trees on home properties  in the Twin Cities are weed trees, Siberian elms, mulberries, buckthorn, silver maple, green ash, box elders, even American elms.  

“I want color”, the homeowner demands.    Maples come to mind.   “I want a fast growing tree” and silver maple comes to mind, one of the most undesireable trees for any city  home lot and most lots beyond.  

The green ash is everywhere.   It is also fast growing and very weedy…..and cheap, very cheap from mass production thirty and forty years ago when folks hunted around for replacements for the American Elm.

Anything evergreen in trees is almost always called “pine” by our fellow northland natives.    Whether spruce, hemlock, arborvitae, fir or pine, they are called pine.   As mentioned earlier they are often not thought of as a ‘tree’, only as a pine or evergreen.

There is absolutely no difference between a White Oak, Sugar Maple, and a White or Scotch Pine in their natural growing habit.    If their lower branches are not removed, or die out due to lack of light, or are eaten,  they all   become shade trees…..big shade trees, at that……100 feet high shade trees whether your city neighbor wants shade or not.

Folks generally don’t like to cut down trees on their own premises.  It’s an emotional thing.   Some of the Colorado spruce around the Twin Cities are 80% dead and show every per cent of the  ugly deadness…..yet, no one cuts them out to make their home grounds more beautiful.

Most homeowners for that matter take their home grounds as it is without much thought of beauty.

I am not a fan of crab apples.    Unless our clients demand “crabs”  we prefer the redbud and the pagoda dogwood among the smaller class of trees usually sold as ornamentals.   

A far more beautiful tree than any crab apple, in my view, of course, is a new one for our horticultural zone market and not yet readily available……the Paperbark Maple, Acer griseum. 

No, it does not possess colorful flowers.  

It is a neat, very precisely shaped tree in  form and leaf, midsized, with the most beautiful colored bark to see back lit in sun.    Place it on the South aspect and be captivated by its radiant rich reddish to caramel brown peeling trunk all day long when sunlit.  You won’t get much work done, but you sure will be inspired by the scene.

Its fall color  depends upon the length of autumn before snowfall.   In its native states, Pennsylvania and Ohio, the tree displays as beautiful a fall color of foliage of any tree.

Think carefully before buying any tree to be planted  on your home grounds.   Consider its mature size and its expected size in ten years.   If you live in one of those suburbs where all of the grounds’ top soil was removed, you might be lucky to grow a Box Elder.    There is always the Siberian Elm…..which would probably grow well in Hades.   You won’t be able to buy it at your local nursery.   So, snooker up to  a friend living in Minneapolis or in one of its inner suburbs and collect a few of the millions of seeds or simply transplant one of the Siberian Elm already a weed.    You won’t mind the tree  if you believe that halitosis is better than no breath at all.

Consider how much of your homegrounds  you want covered with shade.    Lawns grow poorly in shade……think weeds, because they will.   Fewer shrubs and perennials grow well in deep shade.    Worst of all if your grounds are covered with shade, you cannot see the beauty displayed by  the sunlit shadows, character  and colors of  components which make  the landscape a gardened one.

Plant your trees and shrubs according to  the path of sunlight across your homegrounds.    Remember that the sun without clouds is nature’s spotlight constantly moving across the stage.   While the deep shade of the garden may be cooler in summer by twenty degrees, its shade if everywhere will deny the drama of  what is specially lit for a few minutes and then slips out of the picture into shade.

The landscape garden’s best friend is the sun.   Its  second is shade, and third is water.

Beware of planting the big trees.    The trouble with these trees is their shade, despite its pleasure….and their roots.    Too many big trees on the homegrounds  is what makes hostas  so popular.

September 1, 2011

Fall is a Good Time to Plant

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, perennials, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 9:04 am

Yes, Autumn is a good time to plant…..especially in September.  I admit I prefer Spring as the best time for planting most of the more permanent garden material.   One can better view when something is going wrong with spring planted material.

I usually don’t recommend landscape gardeners go hunting for bargains when  looking for  principal plants, the most important trees and shrubs of your landcape picture.    Yet, let’s admit it, most of us who are “taken” by plants are often “taken” by plants even if we know  nothing about them……at any lower price or accept freebies from friends or ‘enemies’ for that matter…….Enemies  being  persons who offer to sell you or give you Aegopodium….the perennial ‘Snow on the Mountain’ for your gardened grounds.

Not all plants are equal.

I am trying to think of any groupings or individual plants that should not be planted in Fall.   None come to mind and I don’t have any vibes that I am forgetting any.

Some plants are better transplanted this time of year.   September is the best time to transplant Peonies, for instance.    As a rule fleshy rooted perennials are better transplanted in Fall, and skinny  rooted ones in the Spring.

Of  course I am hooked on buying expensive plants this time of the year  for my own landscape grounds, if I see a bargain for a plant I am particularly curious about and is on sale…….or any time of the growing season for that matter.   I confess I am  a plantaholic…..I buy with self interest and pleasure whether I need the plant fix and have  the money for it or not.

For the uninitiated to this dilemma, plantaholism is a major disease among landscape gardeners and others who play in their home grounds soil.

Some folks are fat because they eat too much or eat the wrong foods.   Some gardens are fat because their caretakers buy too much or buy the wrong plants.

August 2, 2011

Summer - 2011: Hot….Humid….Wet….and Mosquitoie

Filed under: The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, shrubs and trees — glenn @ 11:05 am

Fellow Vikings and foreigners to our Northland…..This summer is the closest to the tropical in my gardening lifetime.   Hot, humid, wet and tons of mosquitoes….not a winning season for us who ‘work the soil’, but the formula sure works for plants.    I expect to see dinosauers any day now coming out of the jungle.

At least there are no tsetse flies.   Just plenty of Japanese beetles.

Throughout the summer of 1988 there was more heat, believe it or not, but no rain.   That was not a pretty season for the landscape gardeners’ eye or nose, for that matter.

Last year’s Minnesota landscape garden season  was among the best ever.   Spring was early.   April was warmer than May.   The azaleas loved every minute of the reverse and stayed in bloom for weeks.   Ditto for nearly all of the plants noted for their spring blooms.  Never were their fragrances more enticing.

Spring lasted about a week this year…..arrived late and bumped into Summer early.   Hail and tornado destroyed or damaged  some of our Twin City gardened grounds, but missed mine.

Many rains this year have been heavy.   So what does all this mean for the landscape garden?  

For an answer I shall turn to my own tropics…..the half acre surrounding my house.

On one Friday rather recently, while working at  grounds on Mary Street east of St. Paul  during an off and on  deluge, Noah’s Flood finally arrived and sent me home to check out the damage.   The pond path was squishy, the Gigas grew a foot in my absence  and my basement had nearly an inch of water throughout.

My gutters had clogged despite being ‘cleaned’ earlier in Spring.   The principal area of entry needed to be regraded somewhat to lessen chances for flooding when  clogging occurs in the future.   I decided to remove two arborvitaes, each about 25 feet tall, whose foliage draped over each downspout causing some of  the deluge in the basement.

Neither I nor any visitor to my grounds would ever miss the dismissed trees.  

The devoted landscape garden artist must be flexible and remember that there are many roads to beauty.   One should also remember that classical beauty is  NOT “in the eye of the beholder.   Some things created and seen are simply far more beautiful than others.

There are rules and generalizations to follow to attain classical beauty in the landscape garden.  It also usually requires inspiration, thought, and knowledge.

What was essential for beauty twenty five years ago, may no longer be serviceable to the ground’s artistic requirements…….which, of course, arise from  your eye and brain.

Why is it that every garden season almost every grounds of the devoted landscape gardener become more beautiful?   Because every year the eye of the beholder becomes more experienced and therefore more demanding.

This often causes  a serious crisis confronting our female landscape gardeners…and there are quite a few of these gals……..those who discover  there is more to a landscape  than flowers.    Gals  fall in love with trees and shrubs, and often, no matter how vulgar the woody plants, tree or shrub, might be to the eye, both in harmony and health to plantings or persons  near by, they draw a line.    That line may include a very cold shoulder for years to come for the very thought of causing harm to their beloveds.    Yes, there are a few men in this category as well, but reason often wins them over.

Nothing alive stays still in the landscape garden.   Its art form is in constant turmoil….especially in our Northland.   Yesterday will never again be lived.   Today’s beautiful  masterpiece will never again be seen.   Even the setting so inspiring in the landscape  just ten minutes ago, will never again be seen.   So, again…….

             The landscape garden artist must be flexible and patient.

Not all ugly trees and shrubs are ugly.   More homeowners curse the world of junipers.   “I don’t want that prickly stuff  anywhere around my house”  is said about junipers more than any other garden plants.

Yet, junipers  often produce  the most beautiful plant forms created by traditional Japanese garden artists skilled in the pruning arts.

The most popular art  practiced in our America is gardening.    We see its result whenever we go outside.  It is often not pretty.    We must view no matter how ugly the art might be set.   It is most often exercised at the level of  placing plants whereever there might be room no matter what the character of the plant might be.  

 There is too much information for the busy public to absorb in their busy day.

For those interested in the landscape garden, begin your lessons always  remembering to ask yourself:

“What is to be placed where…..and why?”  

Ask it every time you think  ’landscape garden’.   Whether hot weather or cold, wet or dry, winter or summer, you will begin to create harmony to your art.   It is infecting….enticing,   and you will never look at the plant world as you have in the past.l

The beautiful landscape garden should be for the eye, what Beethoven’s concerti are to the ear.   Unfortunately, there are very few available for eye to view even though it is a lot easier creating a spectacular landscape garden than a Beethoven!

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

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