"Gardens, like people, gain character with age" is a truism which, at least in the dream of things, is TRUE. In both cases good fortune is a necessity. Both people and beautiful landscape gardens can be destroyed, ' killed ' by the same tornado, mud slide, flood, fire, or earthquake. As a generalization, however, the adage IS true, at least in the ideal. Both beautiful people and beautiful landscape gardens usually need help,...
Read More >>My parents bought the house in which I was raised in 1936 in St. Paul, Minnesota. It was newly built on a "vacant" lot of the more prairie edges of the city south of Randolph, west of Fairview down to the Mississippi River itself. "Civilized" American urban areas were developed post Civil War with the arrival of European immigrants for the next forty years or so. Scandinavians, Germans, and Czech went rural. Slavs, Italians went Iron...
Read More >>Yes, what on Earth,IS a weed! Our governments and other fanatics who choose to dictate human thoughts and moods these days, insist weeds are plant-like things they've been programmed to dislike in order to feel good. These 'dictate' people are indoor people...office people.....downtown people, usually government people who live amid cement and asphalt. If these people are third or more generation Americans, their grandparents were raised on a farm, not the street.....but they...
Read More >>Masterpiece Landscaping is a Twin City, Minnesota artistic landscaping company nearing its 30th birthday. We line up and plant garden trees, shrubs, annuals and perennials in rows only when artistically required to fit formal settings or for some other special artistic display to inspire visitors. Landscape gardens, ideally, should inspire the designer, the builder, and above all, the home or business owners and their visitors whom we serve. It should never be forgotten,...
Read More >>......or, at least they should! But, then, what is a landscape garden? It is not a vegetable, beer, or flower garden, that's for certain. A landscape garden, at its best, is the most honored of all human art forms. Nearly every human culture's paradise is perceived as a garden perfection, therefore....a, THE, Garden of Eden....a place of perfect harmony for the eye, body, mind, and soul. Its pieces are various collections and...
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 >>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 >>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...
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