One of my favorite woodies in my gardened grounds is Aralia spinosa....(Aralia spinosissima). About forty years ago it arrived in my possession around mid- August, I had a large vegetable garden and was beginning my artistic landscaping of my property nearly 90% of which was covered by a mediocre lawn. I was director of the Minnesota State Horticultural Society then. Our office was located on the St. Paul University of Minnesota Agricultural School...
Read More >>Some things heard and/or seen are simply more beautiful than others.....in the eyes and ears of the normal, that is.....Psychotics live on a different planet 'normally'. Beethoven's adagios make the recordings of noise at your local super market sound like dead skunks stink. No one listens to anything Beethoven anymore. What is celebrated as music today is noise to the ear as the fragrance a well used summer out house is to the...
Read More >>No one could have loved a career more than I, Glenn Herbert Ray, now approaching his 82nd year of life. For you readers to bear "witness", it's 5:30 PM this moment as I sit at the computer after spending ten straight hours "working" my landscaped home grounds to maintain and increase its beauty. My cartilage-less knees are killing me at this moment. It was this pain which put an end to my today's...
Read More >>Masterpiece clients, friends, followers, helpers, and 'newbies' are all welcomed to join our Masterpiece Landscaping family Open Garden at our home grounds, this Thursday, May, 26, 2016, from 4 PM to dark..... Usually this event occurs in August, not always the most spectacular show time to display outstanding landscape beauty in our Minnesota. In beautifying the landscaped garden world, May is the most beautiful, the most fragrant, colorful, inspiring refreshing season of the year in our...
Read More >>No year is ever a carbon copy of another. No day in the life of an animal, including the human one, is a "carbon" copy of another. Life is filled with errors and the unexpected , for WITHOUT ERRORS OF NATURE, LIFE, WHETHER PLANT OR ANIMAL WOULD NEVER CHANGE. I am in my 80s..... and began landscape gardening in my neighbor's sandbox about 75 years ago. I have many memories of my...
Read More >>The vast majority of urban and suburban home owners and others who visit the outdoors rather often, are not particularly interested in beautiful landscape gardens. Such gardens are too rare to be found. If ever found, they are usually limited to the back 'yard'. Not that there might not be well manicured grounds, well mowed lawns, a healthy tree or two implying a degree of neatness and care somewhere. But where are...
Read More >>One of the finest conifers introduced to the Twin City landscape garden market is Chamaecyparis pisifera, Vintage Gold. Its advertised form is global, reaching about three feet in height. A human generation or two ago the only golden foliaged conifers seen on anyone's grounds, private or public, were dying arborvitaes. Dying junipers usually chose brown before yellow as their passage to death color. Chamaecyparis pisifera, King's Gold is a flimsier, fluffier foliaged...
Read More >>Landscape gardening is supposed to be an art form......the most cherished of all art forms......for in nearly every human culture known, Paradise is a Landscape Garden! In the ideal, landscape gardening is to the eye what Beethoven is to the ear. Unfortunately in today's American culture, neither are practiced, neither seen nor heard. At best we live in the noisy aural world of Prince where the body is stimulated not the mind and...
Read More >>Every year more and more Americans live and work indoors. Every year more and more Americans know more nothing about their outdoors where they live. I was lucky being born 82 years ago. I was raised in the city, in a house on a ninety by forty-five foot lot taught to know the outdoors, both at home and at school. It was in first grade before World War II when I was first...
Read More >>We in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area this garden season thus far, are living our usual early May in middle April this year of our Lord, 2016. We have had a mild and short winter season. Being a landscape gardener, I have been rooting for a tad of global warming here in our Minnesota for the past sixty years....and my plea was almost answered until a few years ago of rough winter. The best garden...
Read More >>