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.

January 5, 2012

Landscape Garden Life among the Coyote

Filed under: Residential Projects, Rodent Control, battling the Minnesota climate, garden maintenance, random fun, winter landscapes — glenn @ 3:28 pm

I have coyote preying on my grounds.   The resident couple have produced a pup.   We seldom see these folks, but they are there and we have quicky pictures to prove their settlement.

In the thirty eight years of my residency here in suburban Minneapolis , I have been able to create and maintain a beautiful  classic landscape garden.   We live in a climate in which winter is the major landscape season, as long as all of the other landscape seasons combined.   

As a boy I noticed that.   I delivered papers both morning and after school.  It was an outdoor job…..Although I hated delivering papers in the winter, I loved  the early mornings throughout the year….the 5 AM mornings  before anyone but paper boys were prowling the streets…..except once in a long while  when a coyote came to view.      Fox at 5AM were fairly common, but not coyote.   Fearless through ignorance, I’d drop my paper boy’s delivery bag and try to follow the creature.

We haven’t noticed coyotes anywhere in my neighborhood until  three or four years ago.   I had seen one in the center of Minneapolis about ten years back  in the garden of a good friend of mine.   It was dark winter and I had just  turned into the driveway.   Suddenly a coyote I distrubed  looked up at me.  ”He”  had  torn something apart which was drooping from its jaws…..and it wasn’t a plant.   “He” was mangy-looking (all coyotes in my vocabulary are male unless proved otherwise), and “he,” coyote-like,  grabbed his kill and ran off into the dark.

My grounds are filled with evergreen conifers……the plants of good memory when I needed them as a news delivery boy  to hide behind during the wild blizzards  50 plus years ago before these wonderful days of global warming in our Northland.

Conifers  come in many  sizes and shapes these days.   Those sizes and shapes are well displayed in my ‘paradise’.   So is snow in winter…..except for this winter thus  far.   

Rabbits and squirrels, birds and voles used to love these conifers-of-all-sizes winter garden.   Until about three years ago.  

Today, only the birds still  do.  Actually, there are more of them of all kinds than in the past.    

No longer do the rabbits and voles eat up all of the lower foliage of the arborvitaes.   No longer are squirrels fighting to burrow into my house eaves to mooch off of  my expensive winter heating and escape the winter winds.

Instead, I  see replacement  foot prints in the winter snow as I walk  along my garden paths.   They are dog-like, but I allow no dogs to enter my space whereever I think I rule.  

My lovely garden now houses new visitors,  ’Canis latrans’ the coyote,  into my space, whether I like it or not.   They are about the only footprints etched in the snow these days.    New prints arrive with each new snow dusting or snowfall.

While searching for television something or another a few days ago, I came across an hour’s worth on the expansion of the coyote population  throughout America……the America that still includes Arizona, New York , California, and Florida.

“Although assaults upon humans are rare, they do happen…..” the narrators admitted more than once.   The deaths are more  frequent in PARKS  the Northeast….Massachusetts and New York, for instance.    They noted an example of an ourdoor type gal who was a regular hiker  in an urban public park.   Two  coyote had stalked her, had run her down and destroyed her as others in the park who had heard  her screams arrived to the scene  too late to save her…….and fended off the two coyote killers.

We live in a time where equality among mankind and ’other’ animals  is required by some politicians and university instructors…..we must live ‘as one’ with nature.   I accept  this dogma, but I do believe I must add, “barely”.    

I still believe the human being is sacred, out of fashioned as that may be.  I am  not the equal of the coyote or squirrel.    I prefer me to rule in my landscape garden rather than  coyote.   If I have to put up with something of a lower order than I am  in my paradise, I’ll go for the hungry  mink, who have happened to drop by upon occasion.

The equality people, the stars of this  television program on coyote, that is, the park rangers, the animal huggers who work for the state to protect wild life, and their similars, (isn’t English a terrific language) who love coyote, seem quite sincere in their warnings to the general public reminding  them that coyote can be our killers.  

“Don’t feed them”, they advise…..and then they move on to their coyote loving.   I admit.   Their ‘chicks’ ARE cute.

“Coyote have naturalized nearly everywhere throughout the United States, even on Manhattan Island in New York City”. 

Rangers who keep an eye on these exploding coyote populations mark the  ’cute’ beasts in their youth  to follow  their roamings henceforth…..your tax money at work.      “They lack competition from bigger predators.”  the experts  announce, hinting that the timber wolf once roamed our streets  widely before we had streets.

Besides “Don’t feed the animals”, here is the official message from these state officials representing urban  American  visits from the ever larger coyote flocks……

“When taking  your nature  hikes in your local parks, suburban or urban, or your landscape gardens, you should take a stick along with you……just in case.” concluding that the coyote is our human equal in the eyes of the modern educated park bureaucrats.   “We must learn to live along side ‘nature’.

There was a moment the narrators offered a degree of  politico-social-religious  ’balance’, a brief one for sure, but an effort nevertheless.   I think the setting  was in Colorado, in a suburb of Denver. where a  park ranger being interviewed by the coyote huggers,  glanced with a hint of a wink at his power rifle when he was asked about his recommentdations  for coyote control.

I enjoyed the program as you, dear readers, might have noticed from the rhythms and a embellishments of this writing.

The American has become and indoor population despite their occasional bicycle and hiking jaunts from their bureaucratic life  into the great outdoors.    When I was a kid most Americans worked outdoors for their living.    Most  owned a rifle for their outdoor business…..controlling wolves and coyote, puma and wild this or  that which decimated their food supply and not infrequently some of these outdoor people as well.

Today indoor people look at animal life romantically.   I do too.   One of the most beautiful sites Mother Nature can cook up for me  is to see the beautiful sleak cougar eyeing and plotting the kill of its prey….as long as one doesn’t romance too much  of the prey’s immediate future.   

I think it a tragedy  that  ”lions, tigers and bears”…..well not bears, yet…..are disappearing from Earth due to mankind’s ‘interference’.   

In the meantime I guess I’ll  have to  position a few sticks  for self defense, artistically placed , of course, blending them  into the lines and curves of my lovely  landscape garden.

 

 

 

 

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 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 28, 2010

A Few Words About Autumn Color in the Landscape Garden

Filed under: Ground Covers, The Art of Landscaping, battling the Minnesota climate, shrubs and trees, winter landscapes — glenn @ 11:37 pm

The Landscape Garden is more than what most people consider to be garden.   It is an enclosure to enter, stroll though, walking the paths up to and passed plants which might appear sculpture at one look, and framing after a few paces along the path.  Envision a private woodland with windows and openings where beautiful forms or colors can be seen and beautifullly displayed.

Benches in the distance  entice  visitors to find the path to a resting place, providing for yet another scene where a sitting may resurrect cherished memories or inspire new thoughts……and smell new fragrances.

Last Sunday and Monday were the best days of color ever from my grounds.  The mists coated the yellow, maroons and greens and  oranges with a sheen  that made them glow.  The shrubs and understory trees were old enough, therefore large enough to show off their colors in mass.   The paths were overwhelmed with dottings of every color possible from the leaves primarily from mature red maples, Acer rubrum. 

Grace smokebush, Mount Airy Fothergilla, the garden’s featured  redbud, the dusty plum red cedar, bright green Wintergreen Juniper, Dwarf Blue Spruce, Dark green Taunton Yews and Tree yews, chartreuse Sunkist Arborvitae, slowly changing from summer yellow, the red barberry leaves, the blackish  leaves of an  enormous baptisia with  the seedling white and red oaks and their magnificent red and maroons, and the most fiery of them all, the leaves of Aralia spinosissimma with some purplish fruit still in tact lead the list with  the most shockingly colors of the show.

Autumn color in my grounds usually begins about October 7.   My massive white pines begin dropping their older needles and seem to cover everything for a week or so.   The mature red maples, which I have been losing one after another recently, begin the color changing normally.

I have many, many confers  and many which are dwarf or semi-dwarf…In just a few days they will begin to dominate the entire landscape with their form, size and color.

My landscape grounds almost always are as beautiful throughout winter as they are in the  best of  any other season.   Especially since I have protected it from deer feedings with fencing.

More homes would appear more beautiful if they had grounds specifically designed for a winter garden.  Minnesotans should remember that no plant beautiful in winter is ugly in summer…..but may plants which may be beautiful in summer are ugly or disappear in winter.

I must have about 100 hostas planted,  lying about somewhere.   Some varieties turned bright yellow, some showed darker patterns than their summer look, and yet, many of the older maintained the brightest, purest green, before their collapse as a garden showpiece.

Some hotlips Chelone was still in bloom as were several Goldsturm Rudbeckia which were growing in deeper shade. One of the best newer varieties on the market, Fireworks Solidago has been in bloom for three weeks…..a spectacular plant if planted in full sun. 

 On Sunday the sun tried to find room to break through the mist, but didn’t quite make it, making the various scenes show off in perfect lighting for best color display.

Many junipers change color in fall.   Hughes, Prince of Wales, Andorra, the red cedars usually, turn plumish sometimes to almost a maroon, and some red cedars to a brown.

A finished landscape garden has a plant display, cover  or grouping  generally at every level of height  to the  highest tree  grown, which could be a dwarf or semi-dwarf.   Negative spaces may be filled by a variety of mulches or varieties of low growing ground covers.

Remember the greatest expanse of negative space in most home grounds is turf.   Trees without negative space around them no longer are trees but become forests.

Increase your autumn color and winter forms by planning ahead perhaps this winter.   Walk through your grounds to evaluate its winter beauty….

Usually Minnesotans forget about how beautiful they can make winter be with the right selection of plants led by the coniferous evergreens.

February 13, 2010

The Winter Garden Made More Beautiful

Filed under: winter landscapes — glenn @ 7:26 pm

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!

January 22, 2010

Beauty in the Bleak Season

Filed under: winter landscapes — glenn @ 11:21 am

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.

September 9, 2009

What Is The Longest Landscape Season In Minnesota?

Filed under: winter landscapes — glenn @ 7:47 pm

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.