THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Terry Pratchett
This week novelist Terry Pratchett passed away. He had been suffering with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease …
Eco-friendly Animals
The question of which animal you should keep as a pet, if you want to tread lightly on the earth, cropped up this week. It is a great question, another part of Modern Living that needs to be questioned and thought through, and was inspired by watching the elaborate and bonkers dog show Crufts. For those of you who don’t know what Crufts is, it is a dog show that allows breeders and handlers to bring their animals together to show off how they look. They get rewarded for being the epitomy of what it is thought the breed should look like …
James Van Sweden (Part 3)
We come back to James Van Sweden a lot on this blog – and the start of this interview sums up for us the reason why! In it, James Van Sweden says this about his garden design work with Wolfgang Oehme: “We never took it too seriously… because then you don’t have any fun, and you don’t create really fabulous gardens.” Gardening is fun! And remembering that, cultivating that, will help you on more than one account – a sense of humour about your garden helps you to realise the inconsequential nature of your delphiniums being eaten by slugs, or the …
Gentle Heart
3 ideas for becoming a better gardener – have clear eyes, a quiet mind and a gentle heart. These pictures are from a trip to the west of Ireland last October. It was easy to sit on the beach here, to let go of worries and any stresses and just… allow the time to pass. It really was a place to cultivate the eyes, the mind and the heart. Your garden is a place to do this too. Enjoy it, work on and with it, and allow it to change you in its soft and understated way. Use your garden to …