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Who Reads Fine Gardening?
Fine Gardening is written for gardeners who are passionate about their existing gardens, and are looking for ideas and inspiration for future gardening endeavors. Published six times a year, It presents readers with engaging information and gorgeous four-color photography, in a format that is both educational and accessible. While some gardening experience is assumed, and home ownership is usually implied, much of what is included in Fine Gardening will be of interest to anyone who feels the call to garden, of all levels of experience. You may find yourself saving issue after issue, since all are filled with valuable, practical information, and back issues are valued due to their seasonal nature.
What You Can Expect in Each Issue:
- Tips: Reader-written, these tips are great for discovering new, and usually economical, ways to do what you’re probably already doing – but better and quicker. This is in addition to Over the Fence, the letters-to-the-editor section.
- Plants to Know and Grow: Editor’s choice of unusual or new plants, called out for their foliage, growth patterns, and blooming. Also includes zone charts, ideal conditions, and what to feed them.
- Q&A and Design Ideas & Plans: Written by landscape designers, garden curators, and horticulturalists, this section focuses on solutions for particular areas of your yard, such as driveway strips or property line fences, or on planning out designs for various color schemes or planting types. Also features questions from readers, answered by experts in the field.
- Healthy Garden: A monthly column devoted to fixing what ails your garden, including pest, diseases, and invasive species.
- Feature Articles Covering a broad range of topics which will entice intermediate to more advanced gardeners, topics have recently included "Designing with Annuals," "Pruning Hollies," "Demystifying Garden Myths," "Nine New and Unusual Grasses," and "Selecting Trees for Structure."
Past Issues:
 October, 2007 |  February, 2008 |  August, 2007 |  February, 2007 |  December, 2006 |
Contributors
Each issue includes a "Contributors" page, complete with concise biographies and some photos of the authors featured in that issue. The range is wide, but their passion for gardening unites them. Some of them are book authors, like Debra Prinzing, John Greenlee, and William Cullina. Others are garden and nursery owners, or curators/administrators of public or private gardens. Landscape designers and horticulturalists, including academics and professionals, round out the mix.
Magazine Layout
The editors strive for a clean, visually appealing layout, with gorgeous four-color photography included in just about every feature. Other helpful aspects to the layout include specific schematics for certain photographs, showing the name of each plant included in an arrangement. Overall, the layout is meant to be appealing, educational, and helpful to the reader.
Advertising
Advertisers are important to the readership of this magazine, since you’ll likely want to easily find the plants or tools that the editors are writing about. Included in each issues is an Advertiser’s Directory, featuring the page number of the advertiser and their website URL. The majority of advertising is specific to gardening, and include "Reader Service" numbers you can use to fill out an included information request card. Fine Gardening states that they "only accept advertisements for products and services that are directly related to gardening. No perfume ads. No irrelevant clutter," resulting in advertising that is "instructive, not intrusive." They succeed in providing relevant advertising for anyone who loves gardening.
Awards
The Garden Writers Association presented five of their Garden Globe Awards to Fine Gardening and their contributors in 2006.
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Customer Reviews
For those who just love to drool, a multitude of pictures are provided within each issue. One can imagine planting a jungle and completely transforming one's front yard with articles such as "Front Yard Gardens Make a Strong First Impression." The magazine presents a wide variety of gardening styles to choose from, natural, cottage and more formal designs.
Each edition is broken down between Departments, the monthly columns and articles which vary from edition to edition. Departments include Tips, Garden Architecture, Working Gardener, Praiseworthy plants. Basic, Container Gardens, Master Class, Reviews, and Q & A. The departments are packed with information for the serious and neophyte gardener. A recent issue had information on such issues as solar greenhouses the fertilizing benefits of a thundershower, composts, pests, pronunciation of Latin names and garden follies.
Each edition abounds with interesting and creative articles for the reader. Counting the articles in a recent edition revealed that there were nine articles which provided detailed information, lovely photographs and garden diagrams. They range from information about Fritillaries, old roses, building rustic garden structures, adding purple to the garden, circular elements, designing outdoor places to entertain. and evergreen hollies.
If you are serious about gardening or if you are just beginning and want an instructional tool that is tasteful and informative this is a magazine for you.
This is one of the few gardening magazines that covers the US West -- it is different out here, and they know it. It is rare that you will read in any of their articles, "If it has not rained this week..." which is always a sign to Californians that the article does not apply to us.
One of my favorite features is the semi-regular tool essays. It must be a guy thing, but I really enjoy their tool expert explain the proper way to use a tool. Since I started paying attention to his advice, my back has stopped aching so much at the end of a garden day, I know how to keep my shovels sharp (you would not believe what a difference this makes), and I gave away the leaf blower -- there is a real peacefulness to raking leaves that you will never achieve with the Devil's hair dryer.
However, I think the best feature is the tips from other readers. I have learned so many clever things from other gardeners volunteering their suggestions -- one person suggested putting vegetable scraps in a blender jar (it's airtight, so it won't smell) and when it is full, just whizz the stuff and pour onto the compost hear. That tip alone has paid off in my compost pile being active year round. I turn to this section first every time.
It is a great magazine, you won't regret subscribing.
I have been a subscriber for eight years and have kept every issue. The information on the spine is clear and so you can easily find that elusive article you remembered and wanted to refer to, without pulling out every issue and having to look at the cover.
As a professional, I find the in-depth articles on different kinds of plants really helpful. It is neat to focus on say, all the different kinds of Forsythias around, so you can really compare the varieties available and know all of your options if you would like to plant one. They usually have six or more photos of the different varieties, with each photo highlighting an important aspect of the plant's habit, foliage, or bloom, plus a few photos of the plants used in a garden, so you can see what kinds of textures and colors the plant works with.
The articles on landscape design are by well-respected professionals and offer a wonderful balance of intellectually interesting discussion and gorgeous photos. They don't always tell us exactly which plant is which in each photo, so that would be a drawback to the new gardener who isn't familiar with a number of plants, but they usually only neglect to name the plants when the photo is trying to illustrate a design concept. I think they find a good balance between urban gardening/ gardening in small spaces, and gardening in a more country or spacious setting.
They also have articles on seasonal care (and as a reader for eight years, I haven't found any articles that are overlap or repeats), articles on broader topics like groundovers for shade or grasses in the garden (in which they usually include a large and useful list of plants, organized by foliage and flower color, size, sun needs, zone, etc), and profiles on the latest tools, books and other gardening needs.
I have read a lot of gardening magazines over the years and Fine Gardening is by far the best. The language is simple yet the ideas are not dumbed down. Most other magazines have huge amounts of distracting advertisements, and Fine Gardening's are related to gardening, useful, and not too prolific.
Recommended.
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