Today we celebrate 1 year since Modern Mint registered as a business – Happy Anniversary! We have come a long way in that time. The original website, when it went live, totalled a (whopping) four pages. Now we look back in amazement – we have the shop, the garden design work, the Chelsea Fringe projects, the organic topiary, the Ten Meadows project, the garden talks… and this, our 200th blog post. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step… … from little acorns do mighty oaks grow. These are well-known quotes, so over-used it is hard to notice how important they …

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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 …

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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’ …

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