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...
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 >>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...
Read More >>The human genesis on the Earth of our day originally 'arrived' from a garden in our wonderful JudeoChristian religious teachings; from the jungle in the more accurate scientific vernacular. This we do know from the messages provided by genetics, geology, etc,etc. It is amazing how accurately the first chapters so artistically written in English of the King James Version of the JudeoChristian Bible fit the scientific understandings. There are many kinds of...
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 >>The Spring lacing of deciduous tree foliage is about to begin in a day or two here in our Twin City landscape gardening area. It's the time when our major evergreen conifers no longer overwhelm our winter's six month landscape dominating the deciduous ghosts of Winter. My 60 foot Red Maple is already overwhelmed with young leaves and countless bloom clusters causing the first sign of casting its shade. A taller cottonwood, one-third of...
Read More >>There can be no doubt that a well manicured lawn on one's outside home grounds is as beautiful as a stunning Oriental Carpet is on the inside of a person's domain. Yet, if left alone in a vast room of nothing else, how winsome can they really ever be if they lie alone in their space? One carpet requires great human effort to maintain its beauty, which actually includes another art form, the clipping of the...
Read More >>Fewer and fewer Americans engage in 'monkeying around ones grounds' these days. Fewer and fewer Americans can identify five plants growing on their property or grounds near by. Fewer and fewer people bother tending to 'gardens'. More and ever more Americans live all of their lives just a few feet above asphalt. Fewer and fewer Americans have children.....We now import them for political as well as economic reasons. Botany is no longer taught at school....at...
Read More >>Most homeowners in our Minnesota communities ignore landscape gardens. Lawn and a shade tree in the middle of the front lawn, mud in the shadier depths, and the foundation plantings habits fits their needs for the duration. Probably most homeowners are poorer now than they have been for more than a decade. They endure living in their sterile environment. More females mow lawns these days than ever. The American husband population from coast to coast...
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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