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.
Clipsham Yew Tree Avenue
With Chris Poole of the European Boxwood and Topiary Society we visited Clipsham Yew Tree Avenue in Rutland. Do you know it? Amazing place! Chris and I were teaching a topiary workshop in order to give local people the skills and technique, and tenacity! to help with the pruning of the avenue and elevate it to something even more special than it already is. Read more about the workshops here. We hope to run a further workshop in September 2026, as well as teach an advanced course too. Check the teaching page through the year as it will be updated …
Aesthetic Pruners Association – New Talk In December
An organisation I love and have been learning lots from in the last two years is the Aesthetic Pruners Association based in the USA. Sharing knowledge with them about clipping and the overlap – and differences! – in style is something worth exploring, so I recommend a visit to their website and to join onto their events and talks, which are all on Zoom meaning you can access them from anywhere in the world. No excuse not to learn! The next event will be led by Jocelyn Cohen and be about ancient trees in the British Landscape. This is such …
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, …