NOT ALL SPRINGS ARE EQUAL There is no doubt from my life's experience especially in the landscape garden arts that winters were colder, more brutal, and longer during my outdoor life as a child compared to the last five decades of Twin City, Minnesota existence. I was raised in a five room bungalow house in St. Paul, Minnesota. My outdoor winter life began "in earnest" around 1940 when I was six. Despite being...
Read More >>Most folks who own 'grounds' are not landscape garden gardeners. Especially these days of cultures of different drives and habits. Beauty has disappeared from today's American cultural experience and has been absent for more than two generations. Yes, this is a matter of opinion, but most of you readers and "non-readers" aren't old enough to remember the late 1930s through the 1950s when Americans of the Great Depression became dedicated to win a World...
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 >>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 >>Sun, water, soil, and nutrients are the basic essentials for healthy garden plant growth.....Once again: SUN, WATER, SOIL, NUTRIENTS for plant and YOUR happiness!!! Sun: Not all garden plants, either woody or herbaceous, prefer full sun. Others disdain deep shade. Full sun might burn sensitive plants' leaves, turning them ugly brown or pathetic yellow. Deep shade advances diseases on wet leaves which are sensitive to rot. Nearly every perennial plant,...
Read More >>There is something special about the character accompanying folks who beautify the Earth with beautiful grounds. Few of the sixty plus client visitors to our past Thursday's Masterpiece Garden Party know one another. The evening was heavy of air but fortunately, without rain. Gardens draw friendships together. We all had a common bond .....to transform our grounds. Conversations and laughter and addresses were shared. Without question the garden plant of Party talk...
Read More >>When, at what season, does, should, your landscape garden radiate its most inspiring beauty? The answer is simple......Whenever you enter your Garden of Eden. I have lived at my grounds for over 40 years, long enough to be able to do, genetically, mentally, physically, and culturally, what I was driven to do, planting and maintaining a beautiful landscape garden in some form or another. I have been very, very fortunate in life, and have many...
Read More >>Not all Springs are equal. Almost two decades ago a measured thirteen inches of snow fell upon our population center this past week. Although I am a devoted fan of continued global warming, hoping for horticultural zone 5 to become our Twin City standard, I'll take this present Spring's mood any day of a decade. We are a bit short of regular spring waterings, but the temperatures have been quite modest, cool, not cold,...
Read More >>The Landscape Garden of classic western and oriental culture is supposed to be an art form. "One is closest to God in the Garden"......Paradise of nearly all known human cultures has been described, imagined as a "Garden". Yet, at today's universities, in those which bother to include something oriented to landscaping of any kind, preach and enforce politics. Botany has become an unknown science to university undergraduate and graduate students except for perhaps at institutions...
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