THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Next year the Garden Museum will be running a brilliant day out visiting traditional and contemporary topiary gardens in Kent and Sussex.
Full details can be found here, for what promises to be a fantastic time seeing gardens!
First stop on the trip will be to meet us and Charlotte Molesworth, in her garden, where will be demonstrating some topiary techniques and offering some of the best tools available for sale.
Charlotte’s garden is an extraordinary place for wildlife, so this is not to be missed!
Lunch will then be taken at the Walled Garden, where you will be able to see the cucumber and melon houses, before heading over to Fairlight End, the garden of Chris and Robin Hutt.
You may well have seen this garden on TV many times, or featured in magazines.
It is sure to be an inspiring trip and we are really looking forward to meeting these keen topiary artists, exciting them and sharing with them our joy at being able to create architectural shapes from the leaves and branches of plants!
For more information and to book your place, go here to The Garden Museum Website.
For fun with some pruning tools? Go here.
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, …