THE MODERN MINT BLOG
You may know that the first week of May is National Nurseries Week, a time to celebrate some of the best plant growers in the UK.
So to help you choose where to buy your plants, here are three nurseries you may never have heard about before…
King John’s Nursery, East Sussex
Primarily focused on herbaceous perennials, vegetable plugs too.
Wykeham Mature Plants, Yorkshire
Walled garden with over 100 acres of field grown trees and shrubs.
Specialists in drought tolerant herbaceous and architectural plants.
… get to know your local nurseries – you’ll get better advice, better service and better plants.
What more can you ask for?
Further Reading:
British Gardens in Time: The Greatest Gardens and the People Who Shaped Them
… and for something related, but a bit different…
Tree Nurseries – Cultivating the Urban Jungle: Plant Production Worldwide
Brought By Bike – Topiary Making
Brought By Bike is an excellent website I found last month, where businesses offer their services by (of course) bicycle. Modern Mint and my topiary work is now live on the site offering my topiary services, via bike, to the following two postcodes – CM1 CM2 Now I can imagine I will need to borrow a ladder should anyone have a larger shrub, but most town gardens in the Chelmsford area have a need not just for privacy but to let light into the house… so a balance must be struck when shaping hedges and shrubs to cover both needs. …
Transforming Topiary
Transforming Topiary – a video made for the European Boxwood And Topiary Society by Charlotte Molesworth and I, in her garden. We take a dog topiary and work out how to update it, turning it into a bird. Worth a watch I think, and hopefully useful to you! You can see more of my clipping on the topiary page. Or read my Spring 2021 Topiary Provocation here.
Phillyrea From 1682
Phillyrea is one of my favourite plants for topiary. I have been using it for quite a few years as a specimen shrub, mostly due to the fact it clips well and has a tough habit – all good characteristics for a topiary plant. It also has a reputation for being an excellent nectar source for bees… Read more about Phillyrea here. Mentioning this to Malcolm Thicke, a market garden historian and writer, he sent me a some photos of topiary and phillyrea mentioned by John Worlidge in Systema Horticulturae from 1682…. incredible! He also mentioned to me that in …