Masterpiece Landscaping Blog

Now is the time to be analyzing your winter landscape.  This is not the best year for such analyzing.  The snow has been much too heavy causing many of our evergreen forms to disappear into the abyss of snowcover.    Many of my four plus foot high shrub arborvitaes have simply disappeared into the drift totally unnoticeable and likely will remain so all winter long.

The six to eight inch snowfall of last week whitened the setting and pasted some beautiful coverings over many of the side branches and bendings of the larger deciduous trees.  My twenty year old redbud was spectacular.  Clever pruning often is a requirement in creating special forms of beauty in the landscape garden.   Redbuds, plums, and pagoda dogwoods head the list of the medium to small trees which are especially interesting in the otherwise stark winter garden.

This morning being rather foggy, hoarfrost covered the garden.  Yet another look to change the outside pictures for a very different mood.

A somewhat unusual feature of this particular winter…..and the reason we seem to have four to five feet of snow everywhere, comes from the virtual absence of January thaw last month.  In my neck of the woods, in suburbia west of the cities, a solid rain crusted  up the heavy snows of the preChristmas snowfall last December.  Nothing has melted since.   There has been no standing water from snow melt anywhere on my property since early December.  Snowfall keeps piling up.

It is that December rain which has fastened the tops of a number of my conifers to the groundsnow giving the tree a full bend to the trunks.  I don’t think any of the main stems are cracked, but they are vulnerable to breakage if one attempts  freeing them to stand up at this time.  Wait for nature to correct matters…that is, when there is enough snow melt to free the crown without ‘outside’ help.

Should one stake up the bent trees  in spring?….It might not be necessary.  Usually, but eventually, the arborvitaes and junipers will straighten up on their own, with help from the sun, of course.   Dont’ force any of them into shape while it is cold, that is, below fifty above Fahrenheit…..and then only ease the bending tree back into the upright position.

I saw a rather large coyote last week prowling just outside my garden confines, with something on its mind….scent, I suppose I should say.   Coyotes, feral cats, fox, owls, hawks, are all welcome in my landscape.  They all love rabbit.  A garden snake emerged from my garage last October.  I hadn’t seen one on my property for over 30 years.  Welcome back, I thought, as it worked its way across my pation into the greenery.  I was thrilled.

If there has been more than incidental winter damage done to your medium to small trees and shrubs, call us at Masterpiece Landscaping to recapture their  beauty.  Some of the most beautiful evergreens in the classic landscape garden are old junipers, both spreaders and uprights.

The same can be said for yews, except it should be remembered that the Taunton spreader yew, and the upright Capitata yew are roughly the same plant. …simply pruned differently.   If left alone and they are located in a favorable location…good loamy soil with some winter sun shadowing, they can live a long time and will reach, if untouched, to heights of twenty feet and widths of the same.  These become BIG evergreens if left unattended.

The same can be reported regarding King’s Gold or Sungold Chamaecyparis.   They are sold in the nurseries as cutzy droopy,  yellowish foliaged shrubs about eighteen inches high.  If nothing is ever pruned, these little things will reach tree  sizes of twenty or more feet.

These Chamaecyparis pisifera trees are among the most Japanese appearing forms in our Twin City landscapes.  I have two twenty footers, thirty plus years old, which I really cherish.

Each of the coniferous evergreen species in our metropolitan landscapes hold snow differently.  The spruce, being very stiff plants to begin with will hold masses of snow fixed to their branches for months if temperatures remain cold.  Hemlocks show as much grace supporting snow in winter as they do without such burden the other times of the year.  The cultivar, Gentsch, is my favorite Canadian hemlock selection.  It is another conifer sold as a shrub, but if left unpruned will develop into an incredibly graceful stunning form all four seasons.

Call us at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd., for your pruning needs….952-933-5777!

One of the great advantages of living in Minnesota is the dramatic change  in the landscape from day to day and season to season.  Most of its citizens are no longer out door people,  meaning that it is  unlikely  they are aware of the full truth of this statement.

There is no garden without light and people.  Light upon the garden in the North is always in a rush.  Today’s ”garden”  as seen, will never again return.

In the North, the most destructive season in any landscape garden is winter.  Despite all of the money, education and effort spent on insecticides and fungicides and other pest control methods to protect our art form , weather rules supreme.   A tornado, of course, governs first.  Winter governs second.  Tornados are rare. Winter is not.

What is a landscape garden?   It is a piece of land made beautiful by an inspiring arrangement of plants.   This garden is the “art” form most frequently expressed well or not well at  home grounds.

In Minnesota our longest landscape season is winter.  In truth rather than in fictional advertising, our winter landcape stretches from November first to April first…..five months at the minimum if we ignore the unwelcomed snowfalls which often occur in May.

At Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd., we encourage our prosepective clients to remember these climatic rules of life in our northland.  We always plan our settings with winter in mind.

A lovely flower garden in June and July is vacant in January.  A grounds empty of evergreens appears dead throughout winter unless one is so lucky as to own a white oak which retains its lovely bronze foliage throught the cold season.

When I taught my classes, “Beauty in the Bleak Season”, and “Landscaping the Minnesota Home Grounds”  through the University of  Minnesota’s Extension Service  throughout the 1980s,  I wanted students to remember a basic rule of landscape garden art in Minnesota:

“All plants  beautiful in winter are also  beautiful in summer.  But many plants beautiful in summer are not at all beautiful in winter.”

Study your landscape garden every day of your winter calendar.  Is it beautiful?  Do you sweep  paths through the garden to get a better, closer feel  of its beauty?   Have you discovered yet, how beautiful a winter garden can be?

If your landscape garden is planned well, every day in summer and in winter, your garden walk will become slower and slower as you become more and more entranced by the sight and fragrance  of its beauty.

Examine your home and business landscape today….this very winter.  Is it as beautiful as it should be?

If not, call  us at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd., at 952-933-5777  soon.

Winter!  Yes, you guessed it…..or did you?   Some people forget that Winter is a landscape season.

Most Minnesotans divorce themselves from landscaping the home grounds for Winter.  What is there to do but shovel snow?  Garden fever begins sometime in February, but it  is a low grade  fever caused by impatience and garden magazines beginning to be noticed on various store shelves.   Then the garden catalogues arrive causing real angst.

Most Minnesotans pay no attention to how ugly their home landscaping is in Winter.  For many,  ugly landscaping is a 365 day per year experience both for homeowner and neighbors.  I know we are not supposed to judge. We are supposed  to make everyone feel like a champion, so let us just say that some home landscapes are not as joyful as others.

When I visited San Pedro Sula, Honduras recently, a city struggling to rise above  poverty with people of very modest means working to keep their home spaces clean and neat, I marveled at the efforts of folks maintaining their small spaces with shrubs and flowers.   The act itself says so much about the people who perform it.

Winter is the longest landscape season in Minnesota.  It lasts as long as all of the other seasons combined.    The Spring landscape begins roughly around May 1st in the Twin Cities lasting for about one month when foliage is no longer new.  Summer lasts until mid September, when the sumac begins to redden.  Autumn,  the season of the Fall of leaves, lasts until about November1.

How long is the winter landscape in Twin Cities, Minnesota, then….November 1 through April 30?  Well, let’s add it all up…about 180 days give or take a week or so.

Why do so many Minnesotans prefer to live in landscape misery for one half of each year of their lives living in the northland?

I think there are two main reasons.  One, it is difficult to plan ahead in general.  One must garden for winter beauty during another season  of the year, and  Two, not enough value is placed on coniferous evergreens in the northern garden. Gardens are too often limited to areas with colorful flowers.  Women traditionally  like these flowers and are usually confined to thinking flower gardens as their world.

But flower gardens don’t show much in Winter.  They are usually covered with the same depth of snow everything else is.  Deciduous shrubs, if there are any, look pretty dead without their leaves.  Elms lining city streets used to be an attraction in winter especially when they were well pruned, but they’re all gone now, replaced by a lot of mishmash.

Have you rated your own grounds on their Winter beauty, yet?  How many times a week do you walk through your Winter garden?  Have you ever noticed the beautiful Theodor Wirth park area in Minneapolis in Winter?  Are you lucky enough to live in or visit beautiful Duluth in Winter?  Or travel the highway near Taylor Falls or around Hackensack on your way to Bemidji?

No  garden of any other season  is more beautiful than a beautiful winter landscape garden!

Central to that beauty in Minnesota is the evergreen conifer.  When we at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd.  evaluate landscape settings for our clients, we begin planning by establishing the design for winter setting.

No tree or shrub which is beautiful in Winter is ugly in other seasons of the year.  But there are many woody plants which may be beautiful in Spring, Summer, and Fall, but are truly repulsive to look at in Winter.  Remember, flowers, no matter how treasured in Spring or Summer, are almost always vacant in winter.

When are you going to begin your Winter Garden improvements?  How about starting as soon as possible?          Call us at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd., at 952 933 5777.