THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Best Gardening Hat
The photo above has a truly international flavour – an Italian wearing a Brazilian gardening hat!
Our very own Stefano posed for this shot last week in Chelmsford, Essex, surrounded by the beautiful flower heads of Stipa gigantea (a plant that has an exotic travelling history itself, being found growing wild in Southern Spain and into Morocco…)
He was wearing a new product we have here at Modern Mint – the eco-friendly gardening hat!
This is a product we discovered about 12 months ago when one of our lovely clients told us about it. He said it was durable, strong, kept off the sun and the rain and best of all it was a hat made from recycled materials!
We were thrilled with it so decided to spend the next year testing it out in all conditions, to see if this hat really was the product it appeared to be. Lo and behold, it passed all the tests and has now made it into the Modern Mint ranks.
Check out the eco-friendly gardening hat.
The hat is made from truck tarpaulins that have been used on cargo trucks running from the North to the South of Brazil, carrying the beans of the coffee you may have drunk this morning. These hats have seen it all – the sunshine, the rain, the red dust roads, giving them a look that no factory could ever hope to replicate.
Each hat is unique and tells a different story of its trucking life below the equator. They are built to last, and should keep the weather off of you here in Blighty!
The making of the hats is done with adult only labour in Brazil, and the employees work in good conditions and are paid a living wage. Which goes without saying, right?
We provide sizes for people with big heads, people with medium sized heads and people with small heads – do see the size guide for more information but you should be able to get a recycled hat that fits you!
We cherish our eco-friendly, recycled, strong and weather resistant gardening hat from Brazil – we hope you will enjoy it too.
10 Years Of Modern Mint
On Valentine’s day this year (2024) Modern Mint, the company I started when I moved to Essex to explore a fresh, contemporary approach to gardening, will be 10 years old. The cliche is time flies… but it does! So much has happened in a decade, from studying topiary with Charlotte Molesworth, to clipping all over the UK (and eventually in the USA and Sweden) to selling shears and secateurs at garden shows and hiding away my reticence to give talks about gardening and topiary to Horticultural Societies across the UK. Ten years feels a good time to mark a new …
Garden Masterclass Trailer – The Modern Topiarist
In 2022 I did a free video for Garden Masterclass, the Annie Guilfoyle and Noel Kingsley run website that is a treasure trove of the great and good of the horticultural world – well worth looking through all the wonderful talks they have available, like meadow-maker James Hitchmough or nurserywoman Rosy Hardy. They are certainly inspirational! Perfect for watching and dreaming up new ideas during the winter months… As a follow-up to my Topiary Provocations video (which you can see on Youtube for free) I was asked to do a video for their Masterclass series on how to make topiary. …
Charlotte Molesworth’s Garden In The FT
The lovely garden of my mentor Charlotte Molesworth is featured here in the Financial Times in the last week or so… She has been interviewed lots of times but I thought this was a particularly great piece, with some photos done at unusual angles and different parts… so well worth a read. For more on topiary by Charlotte Molesworth…