THE MODERN MINT BLOG
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 change.
We have just moved to Whitby on the North Yorkshire coast (after an exhausting search and process to find a home) and so this year I will be focusing on the following for Modern Mint:
- Share the Craft of Topiary – pruning method, plants to use, tools you need, skills to shape plants or clip with to a perfect facade… sharing all the stuff people need to know.
- Exploring the Art of Topiary – the use of abstract techniques to generate form, composition of a view, discovering narrative from the study of a landscape… the intangible parts of topiary and design that begets the joy in life, but is harder to measure or quantify.
Now, the one element topiary always needs is time. Ten years of Modern Mint – and topiary is a commitment on this scale too. Look at these pines I have just planted in the garden at our new place in Whitby…
Tiny and a little inconsequential… right now…. but time is needed for them to become the characters they will become.
And what about these yews? Cut back hard 50 years ago. Just bare sticks…
But look at them now!
Extraordinary to look at (and to work on every summer, of course! You can see more shots of this clipping I do here in a short video…)
So ten years has passed since I started Modern Mint. I heard a phrase recently – you overestimate how much you can do in a year, but underestimate how much you can achieve in a decade – looking at the ten years that have passed so fast, that feels true… but I can see the life spent is something to celebrate… from here on the Yorkshire coast.
And for more on how I will share the Craft of Topiary in 2024, visit the Teaching page.
The Amelia Project – Episode 88: Didius Julianus
Friends of mine write a sitcom podcast called The Amelia Project (I wrote about this years ago, when they started it….!) December 2024 I had some fun playing the tiny part of Fornio in episode 88 – Didius Julianus. I have not listened to the episode yet, as I am clearly not an actor… and the thought of listening to my dulcet tones for the few minutes I’m in it just… makes me feel ill. But the recording and being in the studio was great fun, the real actors were hilarious and the script is brilliant – not just funny, …
Waltham Place Topiary Workshop 2026
With the European Boxwood and Topiary Society, I run two workshops each year at Waltham Place, one of my favourite gardens. The next topiary workshop there will be on Friday September 4th 2026. Details and how to book yet to be announced, but get in touch with them now to get on the waiting list, as last year we had double the amount of people wanting a place than we had space for. The Waltham Place website is here – topiary workshop 2026. See the teaching page for how else I can help you with the topiary in your garden …
Box Hill – Novella by Adam Mars-Jones
I picked this book up back in 2020 because of the title – Box Hill – fabulous, I thought, a book about boxwood. I’ll peruse this for its respective thoughts on the plant I clip most when I make topiary. I didn’t read the blurb on the back. Didn’t know the author (although I knew the publisher, Fitzcarraldo Editions, as I love many of the essays they have published… so trusted the author would be worth spending time with.) By page 2 I realised this novel wasn’t quite what I had expected. I started the book at 10pm, after getting …