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.

Previous to yesterday the vast majority of my grounds was bare of snow.   Where snow did exist, there was no accumulation, but only a dusting here or there in areas beyond the reach of the Sun.

As most of you readers know, I am thoroughly in favor of our Twin Cities moving into Horticultural zone 5.   In some grounds we are almost there, but msot of those grounds are in the Twin Cities themselves.

Last year we didn’t have a January either exactly.   As you remember we had the abundance of snow fall on November 13.   The ‘dump[ reached 32 inches most places on my grounds.   December came and went, dumping more ‘on the place below”.   And January came and went without any January thaw at all.  

It was good for our snow removal business for we could remove the endless number of ice dams on Twin City roofs.   Suddenly, mid February,  warm breezes, the tantalizing kind feigning Spring, ruined the money-making.   We had to wait another six weeks before the landscape gardening season began in earnest. 

Are there troubles assoicated  with a winter without a January?  

You bet there are.   Last evening the temperature hit our season low, zero degrees Fahrenheit after a month of March weather, but March weather without March snow…..the heavy wet kind. 

Some folks noticed tulip foliage already beginning to pierce the soil line on the south locations of their  house.    Although it is possible some Dutch bulbs might be already lost due to this warm and snowless winter followed by this sudden deep freeze,  it depend upon what temperatures are ‘on the horizon’. 

If there is an extended period of below zero temperatures   without any snow cover, any damage to  tulips will be nothing compared to what might happen to countless far  more valuable woody plant materials of borderline hardiness…..such as the Emperor Japanese Maples,  Forsythia blooms (although nearly all Forsythia shrubs themselves are hardy in the Twin Cities, the exposed wood of the Black Beauty Elderberry,  dieback also on many smokebushes to the ground, although their roots probably will survive.   

Young newly planted hemlocks, yews, yellow foliaged Japanese yews especially might be hard hit, depending upon the quality of the soil in which they have been  planted. 

Dwarf ginkgos might be killed.   Some of those other plants you spent $200 per unit for are also likely to be victimized.

As a rule “dwarfs’ of both deciduous and evergreen shrubs or trees are less hardy than their standard parents.   The ones most susceptible to winter kill from snowlessness are those from parents hardy only to zone 4, and most woody plants of horticultural zone 5. 

What to do to avoid the loss  of some of your favorite more sensitive plants?  

If your landscape garden or garden  border, or flower garden bear  no winter mulch added to the soil around their crowns already and you haven’t a bag or two or twenty filled with oak leaves, unchopped, you might think about applying rags or old sheets around the crowns of the plants possibly endangered.  

Tree  and  Intersectional  peonies might be susceptible to damage…..which reminds me as I write this article I have forgotten   to tend to them thus far.

So I have to run folks!  These peonies demand my attention!

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.

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.

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.

We certainly had a number of rainfalls earlier in the year.   Many were of the plundering type in which the downpour was overwhelming but not terribly helpful to landscape garden plants.   Following these deluges, we have had a significant drought.   Here in the western part of the Twin Cities where I live, I don’t think we have had an inch of rain over the past two and a half months.

I have an irrigation system which is scheduled to water the grounds for twenty minutes every other day.   It runs early in the morning, except if I am home weekends.   I like to watch my plants watered whenever I have a chance, so I turn the system on manual when I have the time to see the watering.

My irrigation system was winterized over four weeks ago….during a day of light, very light, rain. 

October is usually a drier month in the Twin Cities, and has been so all of my life.   We usually see a good amount of rain here in September.    With the cooler nights approaching cold nights, plant  need for water is not as critical as in warmer months….and the days of sunlight become significantly shorter in the fall, so there is less evaporation.

And remember although tree shade does reduce moisture evaporation from your understory plantings,  the big trees, mainly maples, elms and basswoods hype up their own water needs first and foremost when dry or not dry, for these trees when mature, aren’t protected by shade…….unless maybe by cottonwoods if you live in an area  big enough  to handle them.

Coniferous evergreen trees are not serious water robbers.  Most  respond very well when watering is reliable.

When the temperatures of summer reach or pass the 90 Fahrenheit degree mark, most of our garden plants begin to shut down to save moisture…….if there is no reliable watering available.

By far the greatest killer of  landscape plants, woody or otherwise,  especially among the newly planted,  is from lack of water…..more specifically, the lack of regular reliable watering.  

Soils also play a role in plant deaths due to drought.   I am lucky….actually my plants are lucky to have a great soil environment from which to grow.   There is no clay hereabouts…..for which I am grateful.    My grounds are loamy  by nature and made loamier by years and years of my mulching the grounds with oak leaves.   Only five  per cent of my landscape garden is in lawn…..which takes nine minutes to mow.    The remaining is in garden plants including trees,  and paths…..and my house, of course.

If you live in our area, and have planted or have had planted a  number of perennial plants, woody or herbacous  in your garden this year after mid July, I advise you  to get out your sprinklers this week as soon as possible and water them well.   It will also help your herbaceous perennials to make it through the winter.

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.

To water or not to water? 

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

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

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

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

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

To clean or not to clean?

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

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

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

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

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

To weed or not to weed?  

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

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

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

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

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

To wrap or not to wrap young deciduous trees?

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

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

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

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

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.