Magazines

British Garden Writers' Guild Awards

Gardenpeople I intended to tell you about the other British Garden Writers Guild award winners sooner but my more or less failed internet connection here in England has prevented me from doing so till now. The situation was exacerbated by my fury at the ISP which charges 10p (=20c) per minute for the phone call to discuss the correction of a problem which is entirely of their own creation – and which they repeatedly fail to correct!

Anyway… Be that as it may… When I finally got to a proper connection, first I posted an update on my own award (well, you would, wouldn’t you…?). Now, the other awards…

There follows the full list of winners. I hope to review the two other winning books before the holidays… I’m sure you’ve heard enough about my own book. If not, check out the judges’ enthusiastic remarks.

You can also see who actually judged the awards here

And you can see the Garden Writers' Guild’s own report here

LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
Ken Muir

BROADCASTING AWARDS
TV Broadcast of the Year
Grow Your Own Veg produced by Juliet Glaves for BBC Birmingham (for BBC2)

Radio Broadcast of the Year
Gardens of Faith by Natural History Unit Radio at BBC Bristol (for Radio 4), produced by Mary Colwel

MULTIMEDIA AWARDS
Electronic Media Award
www.bbc.co.uk/gardening edited by Camilla Phelps

New Writer Award
Louise Zass-Bangham for her article Is all wood good? in Garden Design Journal

Environmental Award
John Walker for his article Time to power down? in Organic Gardening

PHOTOGRAPHY AWARDS
Photographer of the Year
Andrew Lawson

Features Photographer of the Year
Michelle Garrett for images in the article Mosses & liverworts by Jacky Hobbs in Homes & Gardens

Single Image of the Year
Jonathan Buckley for his image entitled Orchid

BOOK AWARDS
Reference Book of the Year
RHS Encyclopedia of Perennials by Graham Rice, Editor-in-Chief published by Dorling Kindersley

Enthusiasts' Book of the Year
Garden People: Valerie Finnis & The Golden Age of Gardening by Ursula Buchan, published by Thames & Hudson (Jacket Illustrated above)

Practical Book of the Year
RHS New Gardening by Matthew Wilson, published by Mitchell Beazley

CONSUMER PRESS AWARDS
Newspaper of the Year
The Daily Telegraph, Kylie O’Brien, Editor Telegraph Gardening

Magazine of the Year
Gardens Illustrated, edited by Juliet Roberts

Journalist of the Year
Jane Moore for articles in Gardeners’ World Magazine

Practical Journalist of the Year
Andi Clevely for his article To dig or not to dig? in The Garden

TRADE & TECHNICAL PRESS AWARD
Trade Journalist of the Year
Graham Clarke for his article Developments in tougher turf in Horticulture Week


Chrysanthemum article in The Garden

Chrysanthsplatetg In this month's issue of The Garden, the members' magazine from the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS), I have an article about hardy chrysanthemums for beds and borders.

Unfortunately, the article itself is not available online for everyone to read. Well, I say unfortunately... But RHS members pay for their membership every year and there's no good reason why non-members should benefit from the services, like the superb monthly magazine, that are provided for them. Ever thought about joining?

What you can see online is the excellent color plate by expert photographer Tim Sandall which I show here - go to the articles's webpage on the RHS website to find out the names of each flower.

And if you'd like to read the article about these wonderful and tough heirloom perennials, and rich treasure trove of other expert articles - join the Royal Horticultural Society!


Gardening magazines - how many copies do they sell?

21170582 Following my recent post about British garden magazines and their websites, I thought I’d take a look at the sales of the magazines themselves. Sales of most British garden magazines are in more or less steady decline.  Competition from the plethora of TV programs, expanded gardening coverage in national newspapers and free online information and advice – well, people feel they just don’t need gardening magazines as much as they used to.

So weekly Garden News is down over 10% year on year and monthly Garden Answers is down almost 20% - but now has an excellent new editor, Geoff Stebbings. Garden News, and its weekly competitor Amateur Gardening, are now down to about one third of the sales they showed in their heyday but there are successes.

Continue reading "Gardening magazines - how many copies do they sell?" »


Garden magazines online

Horticultureweek56040359 A post over on the recently discovered, and excellent, LandscapeJuice highlights the decline of so many print magazines in the digital age. [Update: he's since followed it up with another post on the subject.] Although it concentrates on British trade magazines, the problem of reduced sales and reduced advertising is common to all of the gardening magazines, everywhere. None seem to have dealt with the situation well except for National Gardening in the US which simply abandoned print and went over to the web entirely. It seems to be doing very nicely (although as I write most of the images on its home page are missing!).

Many of those magazines aimed at home gardeners try to slash costs, saving money by increasing the pages of reader-generated words and pictures which, although useful in other ways, rarely bring the expertise, insight and quality that trained professional writers and photographers contribute. But they’re cheap. Some magazines merge, some just close.

In Britain the excellent BBC Easy Gardening closed last year after a 25% collapse in sales while the trade weeklies HorticultureWeek (for garden centers and growers of ornamentals) and The Grower (for fruit, veg and cut flower growers) have had to merge though their websites remain distinct.

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What a garden writer reads

Skylight All writers read, or at least they should, and after I slipped blearily on a magazine getting out of bed early this morning it occurred to me that I’d accumulated quite a lot of bedside reading matter. And I thought I’d list it all, in no particular order. So here goes. It’s a snapshot of my bedside reading life.

Books
Skylight Confessions – Alice Hoffman
    The latest from the specialist on strangeness in suburbia.
Street of Laredo – Larry McMurtry
    Lonesome Dove was just wonderful; this is next.
Becoming a US Citizen – Your Legal Companion
    I have a feeling a legal companion is exactly what I’m going to need when I embark on this adventure.
The Hanging Garden – Ian Rankin
    Features an Edinburgh Detective Inspector; my mum loves them, I find them rather variable.
Brown Eyed Girl – Mariah Stewart
    A mystery, passed across by my lovely wife judywhite.
Out Cold – William G. Tapply
    Another passed across.
Best of Zane Grey, Outdoorsman
    A gift from my daughter, Lizzie. Excellent.

Continue reading "What a garden writer reads" »


The Wrong Reasons to Plant a Tree

The March/April issue of America’s Backyard Living magazine has just arrived and, to mark Arbor Day on April 27 (two and half months away!), it includes a list of the Top Five Reasons to Plant a Tree. And their Number One reason to plant a tree? I kid you not: “Trees boost the market value of your home.”

Oh please… Isn’t the Number One reason to plant a tree the fact that trees look beautiful? Strangely, this most obvious reasons doesn’t appear in the Top Five list at all. This is their list.

These are:

  • 1. Trees boost the market value of your home.
  • 2. One young tree has the cooling effect of 20 air conditioners.
  • 3. Trees can cut your heating costs by 20 percent to 50 percent, and cooling costs by 30 percent.
  • 4. In lab tests, a tree-filled scene reduced test subjects’ stress within 5 minutes.
  • 5. One acre of trees absorbs 6 tons of carbon dioxide and produces 4 tons of oxygen. That’s enough fresh air to sustain 18 people for a year!

The fact that economics dominates, and aesthetic and spiritual considerations don’t even get a mention, seems especially depressing. I need to look out of the window into the woods just to relieve the stress created by reading this list.


In print and online

I met with the editors of Garden Answers and Garden News, two of the top British gardening magazines, today.

The monthly Garden Answers is a practically based magazine with much of the information put across in an easy and accessible Q&A format and which concentrates on the plants - choosing the right varieties and how to grow them well - supplemented by thoughtful shopping advice.

Garden News is Britain’s, perhaps the world’s, only gardening newspaper. It features news, of course, wide ranging timely practical advice and, historically, rounded up awards from the shows around the country. It's still a regular weekly read for specialist gardeners – be it dahlia and chrysanthemum exhibitors or keen veg growers.

Gnandga Both titles have been around for a long time but, like most British gardening magazines, they’re selling fewer copies than a few years ago. A number of magazines are dead and gone, but GA and GN are very much alive and both are now putting a lot of thought into how best serve their readership in the digital age.

There’s a vast amount of information available online now, but just as radio never replaced the newspaper (as was once feared) and television never displaced radio (indeed radio goes from strength to strength) the internet will not replace magazines. The question is how to integrate print and online service to provide the information that gardeners need in the way they need it. There’s nothing like relaxing with a magazine, but the immediacy and richness of the web is equally tempting.

My idea? Use the web to add value to the material in the magazine – additional step-by-step practical advice, how-to videos, extensive where-to-buy information and expanded background on issues which can only be touched on in print. And make most of it available only to subscribers. You can subscribe to both Garden Answers and Garden News here.


The Plantsman magazine wins top award

Plantsmanjun2006_2 I'm always bashing on about The Plantsman -- I tell anyone who'll listen (and some who, I'm sorry to say, pay no attention at all) that The Plantsman magazine from the Royal Horticultural Society is a vital magazine for anyone with a serious interest in plants.

It's not for new gardeners (for whom The Garden, also from the RHS, is more suitable), but for those of us with some experience of plants The Plantsman is simply  superb. And it's just won the award of Magazine of the Year from the British Garden Writers Guild. [The RHS website also won an award, you can check out the winners here.]

Published four times a year, The Plantsman includes examinations of individual plants and individual genera - often sorting out any problems with names; it brings details of advances in cultural and propagation techniques; it looks at new plants and specialist nurseries; You can see the contents of the current issue here. Only a few of the articles are available online but in this issue these include a piece on Thalictrums from Dan Hinkley and another of Hydrangea serrata from Sally Gregson. The previous issue has a piece on stokesias available online together with my own opinion piece on native plants – Too Much Gardening in the Wild.

The big problem is that, outside the UK, it's expensive – and the exchange rate doesn't help. I keep asking the RHS to make it more affordable outside Britain, and to make it easier to order online - no joy so far. Even so... This is great magazine - fascinating, well written with great pictures. And certainly deserving of its award. Oh, by the way… editor Mike Grant was valuable contributor to my recent Encyclopedia of Perennials.