Gardening Fertile Ground For New Magazines
Whether it’s a serious rag with a five-page treatise on potato bugs or a sumptuous glossy with photo spreads about rare orchids, there is a magazine for every type of gardener.
“Gardening magazines are like slugs on tomatoes,” said Mike McGrath, editor of Organic Gardening, a 53-year-old publication aimed at gardeners with dirt under their fingernails and home-grown corn on the dinner table. “I noticed a huge increase in the number of specials and test magazines two to three years ago.
“A lot of people are testing the waters,” McGrath said. “Now we’re really seeing the results of the surge of interest in gardening with the growth of new publications on the market.”
Tour the gardening section of your local newsstand and you’ll find a dozen permutations on the themes of home and garden: Fine Gardening, Country Accent Gardening, British Homes and Gardens, Easy Lawn and Garden, Home Garden, National Gardening, Garden Design, Organic Gardening, Flower and Vegetable Gardening, Country Journal and BBC Gardener’s World.
Magazines about gardening, horticulture and plants have grown 68 percent since 1988, to a total of about 150, said Deborah Stripland, an editor with the National Directory of Magazines.
The oldest continuously published gardening magazine, Horticulture, made its debut in 1904. One of the newest, Garden Gate, printed its first issue in January 1995.
The magazines take a wide range of approaches to the same topic.
Garden Design, a lush and lavish glossy, looks and reads like a bimonthly coffee-table book. The publication takes a white gloves and pearls approach to nitty-gritty gardening topics such as fertilizers, pesticides, lawn sprinklers and weeds.
Advertisers such as Rolex, Rolls-Royce, Infiniti, Waterford, Jaguar and the principality of Monaco took out full-page ads in the June/July issue. Stories focus on gorgeous gardens that require hundreds of hours of planning and care. Each dream garden is accompanied by a precisely drawn plan showing how the garden was created.
By refusing to run any advertising, Garden Gate is forging a new approach. Readers hate advertising, editors say. They resent the space that could have been used for more stories, photographs, garden tips and letters.
For $3.95, Garden Gate gives readers 32 pages of uninterrupted gardening. Features on mulch, container gardening and roses include plenty of photographs, as well as the growing charts and source lists near and dear to a gardener’s heart.
By focusing solely on editorial content, the fledgling magazine has a first-year circulation of 250,000, Steadman said. A renewal drive currently under way is yielding 70 percent success on two-year subscriptions, a good indicator of the magazine’s appeal.
Flower and Vegetable Gardening, a Country Accents special publication, wraps a glossy cover around a plain paper magazine. Photographs are mostly black-and-white, with several full-page color shots. Topics fall into the usual gardening genre - pruning trees, repotting plants, picking out the right shrub for your property and, of course, fighting garden pests.
By contrast, Home Garden’s July/ August issue takes careful aim at gardeners who want a visual feast with their garden lore. A photograph of a Sugar Baby watermelon makes the lowly backyard melon look like a piece of sculpture. A story about flower growers in Iowa taps into pop culture with the headline “The Blooms of Madison County.”