THE MODERN MINT BLOG
Green Oak
Last week Modern Mint visited Terry Facey, British Embassy furniture maker and now designer and craftsman of Green Oak and …
“It’s Not Like School At All”
“It’s Not Like School At All. First You Get The Test, And Then Afterwards You Spend Years Findin’ Out How You Passed It.” Terry Pratchett, Wee Free Men We hope this inspires you to be brave and explore a craft – gardening, baking, knitting, stonemasonry, organic topiary – to just go for it, and put yourself in a situation where you have to observe, and think, in order to work out the answer. It is the best way to start – so go, now, and discover what you can do.
Last American Man
Elizabeth Gilbert wrote the huge bestseller Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything but, as much as we liked that book here at Modern Mint, we think her book The Last American Man is far more thrilling. It explores an incredibly complex character – huntsman, teacher, craftsman, farmer, horse rider and (somewhat incredibly) astute businessman – Eustace Conway, and his relationship to the world, which by sheer force of his own will and personality he has shaped to be what he wants. Or, as the book progresses, we find out he has shaped a world he thinks he wants. …
Art of Creative Pruning
I want to talk about pruning today, as I have spent some time this year with Jake Hobson – a professional pruner. I originally got into gardening by working for a number of tree surgeons, and would spend hours walking around places like Virginia Water with them chatting about how we would dismantle different trees. I appreciated trees, but looking back was oblivious to the role they play in our environment – my job was to take them down or cut them back in a way that would benefit people, and so that is how I viewed a tree. As …