THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Modern Mint are running a project for the Chelsea Fringe.
The project is called “You Should Have Seen It Last Week…” a phrase you will often hear a gardener say when they show someone around their garden. It seems wherever you go, the garden always had less weeds and more flowers back then…!
What is the Chelsea Fringe?
If the Chelsea flower show is the spectacular, trendy, stunning starlet of the horticultural world, the Chelsea fringe is the anarchic, homemade, anything goes fun lover that won’t be home until dawn.
Now in its 3rd year, it is a platform for artists and gardeners to express themselves, to club together for three weeks and encourage gardening in all its forms. If it is interesting, related to horticulture and legal, it’s in.
A real positive for London, as urban space gets ‘greened-up’, there is also great virtue in not spending a lot of money, being imaginative and sharing in the goodwill out there as spring begins turning into summer.
What is the project?
A group of willing photographers, including Tower Hamlets Cemetery and garden designers Amalia Robredo and Anthea Harrison, will be taking photographs of a plant or landscape everyday for three weeks, from May 17th to June 8th.
These pictures will then be placed on the Chelsea Fringe page of the Modern Mint website, and as material builds we will be able to see a gallery of what the plant or plants did actually look like last week!
Where did the idea come from?
The phrase “… you should have seen it last week…” is a normal part of the gardener’s armoury, and worth poking a little fun at. We also tried to get people from all over the world, not just the UK, to take part (and we managed it, with two gardens from the southern hemisphere and several more from across Europe) as we thought it would be great fun to see and compare a peony in Kent just coming into flower, while a cherry blossom from Kyoto begins to pale and fade… while someone in Northern Scandinavia photos the snow melting from the petals of a crocus.
Taking a photo everyday for the whole duration of the Chelsea Fringe also gives us a chance to see how it changes, a flowery version of this, basically… http://everyday.noahkalina.com/
We hope you enjoy and look forward to hearing what you think!
Happy Chelsea Fringe!
EBTS Boxwood Growers Forum
Through the European Boxwood and Topiary Society I worked with Chris Poole and Sue Mesher, members of the EBTS board, and we set up a Boxwood Growers Forum. This was to discuss how to make sure this wonderful topiary plant stays in the public conscioussness – we know many growers, suppliers and distributors have stopped selling it as the cost of replacing boxwood that has blight, or is nibbled by the boxwood caterpillar, makes it unviable to offer to clients and gardeners. But Boxwood is a phoenix plant, and there are ways to deal with the problems associated with Buxus. …
Modern Topiarist @ Garden Masterclass Poland
My video on Modern Topiary for Garden Masterclass has been translated into Polish, for the keen gardeners (and happy pruners!) of Garedn Masterclass in Poland. Tickets for the first showing and q and a were available here. But it will become available on the Garden Masterclass Poland website at some point in the near future – so if you are a keen clipper and want to know more, but speak Polish and not English, then I suggest you visit the website and get watching. (Of course, if you don’t speak English, you may not be able to read this…. hmmm… …
Topiary Hotline
The European Boxwood & Topiary Society are to run a Topiary Hotline for keen gardeners and people who love to clip. Date is tomorrow, April 16th 2024, and you can get a ticket for the Zoom meeting here – Topiary Hotline. Run by Chris Poole and myself, we set this up as an antidote to the huge amount of questions we have to answer about topiary throughout the summer. The plus is that their is an excitement around topiary and pruning. The problem is we need to help people in a better way… … so we will be giving people …