"Special" woodies to me are shrubs and trees on my grounds which are simply EXTRA special.....not necessarily my favorite woodies, the ones I couldn't live without, but those I am extra thrilled to "own" as a part of my landscape garden life. I could not manage this outdoor life of mine without conifers with none as a group more special than the others. Name a creepy juniper, a mature White pine or Swiss Stone pine,...
Read More >>In elementary school and in ninth grade general science and tenth grade biology classes in the St. Paul public schools where I attended, students were 'forced' to develop tree leaf collections. There was no political pressure then to worship native plants as superior to those 'imported' since the times of early English settlement. Ignorance of vegetation, woody or herbaceous is so vast among the general American population these days of nearly everyone under age 60,...
Read More >>I own almost 3/4 of an acre of landscape garden surrounding my rather boxy, not terribly attractive house. It was a white painted house when my family moved in, January 1, 1974. It was seventeen below zero Fahrenheit that evening. There is no uglier color for a house in Minnesota to be painted. Winter with its cold white, is the landscape season equal to all other seasons combined. Worse, the adjacent shutters were blue visually...
Read More >>ANSWER: When a large enough tree is trimmed to be or by nature is programmed to be pyramidal.....that is more telephone pole than umbrella in shape. Unfortunately if there are 200 words, not including the names of plants, associated with performing landscape garden art, the typical homeowner knows about six. The worker at the local plant store knows ten. The modern American has become too divorced from the woody plant world around them. Most homeowners...
Read More >>We write mostly about Minnesota...Twin City area landscape gardening issues. With this in mind, I hear countless complaints about this Spring, Spring 2013 is a lousy one. I am one of these complainers....Cold, rainy, cloudy, windy, snowy for the first six weeks, more rain, more and more rain. Here it is only 30 days until the days become shorter...and shorter....and shorter. I am extra depressed already.....but then, before the rains, the heavy ones today, Sunday,...
Read More >>Landscape gardening is a visual art form.....and so is the magician's magic. Beethoven's masterpieces are aural art forms. We want to exert feelings to the eye as Beethoven causes for the ear.....after all ...beauty is better than the ugly, but remember, if everything is equally beautiful, it is logically equally ugly. The abcs of creating a beautiful Landscape garden is the major question in three parts: What is to be planted Where, and Why should...
Read More >>We have had late, late Spring 'winter' storms in the past. One, one of the worst, occured as late as early May with a dumping here of 13 inches. My conifers weren't into teenagers or adults yet. They were still so cuddly and easily managed. Not all conifers are equal in their abilities to stay in one piece during excessively heavy snowfalls. Let me start with the toughest....or better yet, those which easily handle heavy...
Read More >>I have a 70 foot Ginkgo biloba at the east border of my landscape garden. The following diary of events is visually, one of the most spectaclar events of the garden's landscape calendar. The normal Ginkgo biloba growing in a happy location is a big, big tree. A generation or two ago here in the Twin Cities there was one 25 foot Gb of note growing at Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis proper. It was considered...
Read More >>Americans are overwhelmingly indoor people these days. Their knowledge of Nature outside their windows seems to have disappeared from their minds and therefore language and action. The detachment from our outdoor world endangers who we are as a people, as a culture, and our abilities to survive catastrophe and our abilities to recognize beauty from the ugly. All of the billions of people living on our Earth could become housed within the state of Texas...
Read More >>Autumn is running almost two weeks early this year. It is also likely that this Autumn will be more dull in color. Many falling leaves will have shown no color but dried up brown.....for the very reason that the summer was dried up and hot for our northern clime. The treeless line, that is the rainfall line indicating less than 15 inches of annual precipitation, runs just west of the Twin Cities at a slanting...
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