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...
Read More >>By habit northerners, including amateur and professional 'horticulture' oriented people refer to color in the autumn garden as any color but green. Red, pink, scarlet, orange, rust, chartreuse, gold, yellow, maroon, plum....you get the idea......green is never listed. 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...
Read More >>Because of this present November being exceptionally dry, pleasant, beautiful, and void of a killing frost until last Wednesday night here in the Twin Cities, landscape gardeners have been able to spend more time than usual amid their garden plants. These following questions arise for all of us and our answers may vary from year to year. To water or not to water? Who expected the last part of October to be so dry?......and after...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>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...
Read More >>I was a 'birder' by age 12. I discovered their populations during my morning paper route which included homes at the end of my route, near the Mississippi River in St. Paul, Minnesota. Cliffs...stone abutments....huge boulders, woods, slopes, and torrents of water moving southward, noisily and threateningly. It was exciting to climb and sit and observe. What more could a paper boy want having delivered his papers by 5:30 in the morning with nothing around him but birds...
Read More >>........and this year September is arriving a bit early for my Swiss Stone Pines......the interior needles are beginning to turn yellowish. Autumn begins June 21st or is it the 22nd now with the beginning of the shortenning of the day. Our Northland's deciduous trees are already working on cutting off their today's leaves. Nearly all will be dropped by November 1st, year in and year out. Some of us are lucky enough to grow white oaks...
Read More >>We in the Twin Cities landscape gardening world have had a hot and wet several weeks following a very short Spring. It was only one year ago our world was blessed with one of the most beautiful landscape garden seasons I can remember.......An early Spring....warm April, cool May, and a Summer of nothing general to have worried about. Plantings with irrigation systems did exceptionally well making plants exceptionally healthy......and then November 13, 2010 visited and...
Read More >>It is always the case that beautiful gardens must be seen most often at their very best......for the year, anyway. In Minnesota, today's garden quickly disappears into another piece of scenery never again to be seen in the form and beauty just witnessed. The Sun, the light of our landscape garden stage, thank heaven, never stops featuring Earth's exquisite beauty or squalor, for that matter. Gardens, like people, gain character with age. Our 2011 Minnesota...
Read More >>Income Tax Day has little to do with landscaping unless your business is Landscape Gardening. However, most home owners interested in beautifying their immediate environment are among the roughly 50% of our population who still pay income tax each April 15. (Nearly 50% of Amerians do not.) I am much relieved that my forms assembled by a reliable, long time trusted accounting firm have been sent in, properly organized with all of the important numbers in order...
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