THE MODERN MINT BLOG
“We use minimum tools, minimum management…” Midori Shintani Your garden is a space. How you use it is entirely up …
Terry Pratchett
This week novelist Terry Pratchett passed away. He had been suffering with a rare form of early onset Alzheimer’s disease since 2007, a major health issue he called ‘an embuggerance.’ I met Terry Pratchett around 1990, when he came to a school close to ours. Our school were walked over there to sit in the assembly hall and listen to him speak. I had no idea who he was at the time, though I have a peculiar memory of him telling us how much money he made from each book. (It wasn’t a lot, but then he was selling a huge …
Eco-friendly Animals
The question of which animal you should keep as a pet, if you want to tread lightly on the earth, cropped up this week. It is a great question, another part of Modern Living that needs to be questioned and thought through, and was inspired by watching the elaborate and bonkers dog show Crufts. For those of you who don’t know what Crufts is, it is a dog show that allows breeders and handlers to bring their animals together to show off how they look. They get rewarded for being the epitomy of what it is thought the breed should look like …
James Van Sweden (Part 3)
We come back to James Van Sweden a lot on this blog – and the start of this interview sums up for us the reason why! In it, James Van Sweden says this about his garden design work with Wolfgang Oehme: “We never took it too seriously… because then you don’t have any fun, and you don’t create really fabulous gardens.” Gardening is fun! And remembering that, cultivating that, will help you on more than one account – a sense of humour about your garden helps you to realise the inconsequential nature of your delphiniums being eaten by slugs, or the …