THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Our Desert Island Plant
For the Chelsea Fringe 2016 Modern Mint are asking you a simple question:
What is your Desert Island Plant?
We know, we know – it is a tough question to answer! Out of all the plants out there, all the wonderful flowers you could choose – which could you not live without?
See what other people have chosen.
We thought long and hard about our choice. A few of the also-rans were:
Wild primrose. The ‘first rose’ of the year, a simple flower with a beautiful soft colour. Looks as great en-masse as it does when you peer closely at just a single specimen. Love it!
Peony ‘Sarah Bernhardt’. Got to know this well when we grew cut flowers for florists, it look like a giant apple blossom and makes an incredible display in the garden or in the vase. The fragrance is to die for too.
Stipa gigantea. Anything with ‘gigantic’ in its name is going to be exciting, and this plant offers the most wonderful flower heads on long thin stems. Easy to grow, it can stand above shorter flowers in a border but never crowd them out or steal all the light. Reflects the sunshine from its beautiful flower.
Tell Us Your Desert Island Plant!
But the plant we have chosen, as our desert island plant, has got to be….
Buxus sempervirens. Green, used in just about every garden, it is our desert island plant because of the way it can be clipped. Grabbing a pair of shears and spending time cutting buxus into formal, tight shapes is a lovely way to spend a morning.
Even better is to cut it into something a little less formal!
It took a lot of thinking about, but there you have it – our Desert Island Plant would be the beautiful and useful Buxus sempervirens. But we are interested in you –
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, …