THE MODERN MINT BLOG
99 Flowers Project
We do like a project here at Modern Mint, and 99 Flowers is our new one. The 99 Flowers Project …
Buy Once, Buy Well
When you run a business, you get asked a lot (by other business people) who your ‘target customers’ are – simply, which group of people will buy from you? Labelling a group who share certain characteristics in this way helps you target the customers that will like your products. We do the same with garden plants – we can identify certain flowers by knowing something about the family. For example, you may be able to tell that Geum is in the family Rosaceae because of the shape of the flower, a shape which members of the Rose family have in common. Learning that …
Kavalier and Clay
This is an extended quote from a Michael Chabon book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – it is a wonderful narrative about two cousins who write comic books during the second world war. We read the book many years ago, and have recently revisited it (when we ask why we chose to read it again, it is difficult to work out… we would never read Ulysses again, because it felt long and arduous.This book did too, in places, the first time we read it. But it did keep calling from the bookshelf. We think the reason we chose to read …
Organic Gardening
This post on organic gardening started with us chatting to a vegan. He was suggesting that the moment you mentioned to people you were vegan, they labelled you, judged you on the kind of person you are and the problems you would cause them if they invited you to dinner. We feel the same happens when you mention to people you are an organic gardener, or you work your garden on organic principles. They seem to lean away from you, as if you are dirty, and most definitely untidy (who could allow weeds in their garden? And it is no …