12 Sep 2016

THE BEGINNING OF THE FALL

We human animals  spend much our life "avoiding"  falls. This is particularly true when the coming "fall"  happens to be your 82nd birthday.  Yet, without it I'd be already dead.  (Oh, the irony of Life!)   And without that fall there'd be no blessed Spring. Fall, that is the autumn one in our Minnesota , is a very short Fall, often barely over a month long  with every day the prospect of  colder, much colder...

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06 Feb 2016

Landscape Garden Thoughts Best to Consider in our Northland February and Early March

Spring is not,  by calendar,  that far away from today's February  if you are a devoted landscape gardener.....in particular one who is devoted to express this love  as it classically is supposed to be......from one's soul.   Throughout the history of mankind, there are two 'far superior' spiritually-driven  artistic forms  of human  expression above all others....."Paradise from beautiful music....and paradise from beautiful Earth. Religiously....."One is closest to God..in the Garden," so truthfully discovered  by and...

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15 Dec 2015

“There’s a Change in the Weather” arriving to your TC Landscape Garden Very Soon

I celebrate the year, 2015 in suburban Twin Cities, Minnesota,  as the most comfortable, the most gentle, , the most pleasing to garden plants of all shapes and sizes, and therefore, the most beautiful of my memorable lifetime,  well perhaps only seventy years of it.   Further, when it was decided to rain, the wetness was somehow 'professionally' timed to arrive gently and sufficiently around every third day totally free from  angry cloud bursts.  ...

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11 Mar 2014

Winter 2013-14, the Winter of Those in my Childhood

I have long rooted for global warming....well, not so much global warming as Minnesota warming.....up to a point, of course. That point would occur when the Earth around where I live enters Horticultural zone five.....No warmer, and certainly no cooler. Why would I want to slip back into the dark ages of landscaping in Horticultural zone 3.5 or 4.0? I'll never see the day, but I have craved to be able to landscape in a...

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17 Jan 2014

Deer, not Unicorns, Love my Winter Landscaped Garden

I love deer. My hunter-son hunts them during hunting season. We both are devoted to our occasionally gainful occupation in life, landscape gardening. My home, therefore my landscape gardened grounds which surround it, is located in the third tier of middle, very middle class Minneapolis suburbs. Streets here were planned to curve when homes were built in the late 1950s. The lots are bigger, more often the 250 by 120 foot irreglarly-shaped kind rather than...

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13 Nov 2013

The Onslaught of Winter

We should have shared this Onslaught of Winter article with readers a few weeks ago. However, the nature of this particular Twin City late autumn has been keeping our company busy until the real snow arrives. Each autumn in our area is unique in its appearance and character. No one seems to record each year's peculiarities and we usually remember only the extremes....especially the thirty inches one Halloween in the 1990s and a repeat the...

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06 Mar 2012

The Storm Came; The Storm Dumped; The Storm Conquered

The most beautiful winter landscape garden in my thirty eight years of  living here in Minnetonka occurred this winter, 2011-2o12.   In this the first winter without a January or February in the Twin Cities to my knowledge, there was little snow, no rain, and no cold.    The yellows of the golden chamaecyparis, sunkist and yellow ribbon arborvitaes, the plum of the Andorra junipers, blues of the Dwarf Colorado blue spruce and even the blue pfitzers...

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27 Feb 2012

A Snowstorm, the Heavy kind, Expected. Should Landscape Gardeners be Worried?

Snowfalls are great for Landscape Companies in cold climes like Minnesota who have a snowplowing business in Winter.    We,  at Masterpiece are one of them. Winter is a good time for certain kinds  of pruning, but most  gardens in these parts are in deep sleep this time of year.    Thank God for plowing driveways. I have just spent a couple hours prowling through my own gardened grounds to do some pruning and  prepare some conifers for a...

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26 Feb 2012

When is a Weed a Weed?

When is a weed a weed.   When it is a dandelion? Well, maybe....usually yes, because dandelions makes a lovely lawn appear ugly, expecially when the seeds are produced.   Because the seeds are produced in such numbers, dandelions become a more noticeable weed. In our Masterpiece Landscaping dictionary,  a weed is defined as "a plant out of place". Our Masterpiece Landscape garden where I live doesn't have much  lawn.    If there are dandelions,  they occur occasionally...

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10 Feb 2012

A Tale of Two Winters

  The present winter, the one without a January and February, has been an agitating  one.   We've been waiting winter's arrival since November 13th , the  anniversary of the 25-35 inch snowfall the year before; the winter without any thaw in both  January and February.    The snow kept coming down and piling up around us. Landscape gardens disppeared, hibernating under the snow until mid March a year ago.     I couldn't walk my grounds all snow...

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