THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Earth Friendly Gardener
About The Earth Friendly Gardener John Walker, the Earth Friendly Gardener, is the award winning writer and blogger helping people establish …
Landscape Informs
We have recently been presenting a new garden talk – ‘What Do I Do With This Space?’ – to a number of gardening groups in Essex. (To find out where we are presenting the talk next, please visit the Talks page.) What looks like a simple question has turned out to be incredibly complex to answer, and in a one hour talk of free form ideas we barely have time to scratch the surface. What do people do with the land around them? How does the landscape inform their lives and the choices they make? For example, some people have enough …
Creative Pruning – A Vocabulary
A simple blog post today – we offer you a vocabulary to use when looking at ways to prune creatively, then at the end link to places you can buy tools and read more about the work of some of the key players in the pruning world. We hope this vocabulary is useful though – as you never know when you might need to explain the difference between a wibble and a twmp – it may help sell the idea to a client, or unwilling family member who thinks you should just leave that tree well alone… A Shape and Clipping …
The Gardener as Playwright
We want to quote today from a book by playwright Steve Waters – The Secret Life Of Plays – as we think it ties in beautifully with a way of thinking about gardening and garden design. “A play is a space to house a human story and must have give and, well, ‘play’ in it.” We love this. The quote has important words in, like ‘space ‘and ‘house’ and ‘story’… ‘human’ and ‘give’… the word ‘play’ is so significant it is repeated, and the second time given its own quotation marks! But replace the word ‘play’ with ‘garden’ (after all, it is ‘gardening’ …