Truth in Advertising: The Garden Publishing Industry
Some beginning thoughts on print garden media and how it has drastically changed in the last 10-12 years.
Once upon a time I used to love flipping through gardening magazines and books to search for inspiration. One of my favorites back in the 2000s, while not a strict gardening magazine, was Cottage Living. I wish I still had the stack of several year’s worth of subscriptions but they have long since been recycled. Another favorite was Mother Earth News and of course Martha Stewart Living. I can recall picking up a MEN magazine in an Orlando hotel lobby gift shop while I was at a work conference because of its juicy Cherokee purple tomato on the front cover. It led my husband and I down a rabbit hole of growing heirloom tomatoes in containers in the backyard of our rental house in Florida for several years. Later, I came to know who legend garden writer Ken Druse was in addition to Brie Arthur, Kelly Norris, and a few other up and coming horticulturists were from an issue of Living in 2012.
Cottage Living and MS Living are now defunct and when I flip through MEN at the grocery store I’m always severely disappointed. In fact, I’m disappointed in just about any extant gardening magazine these days. They are costly, very thin, and full of advice you can pull off any garden inspo Instagram account or blog post. It’s frustrating to see how the media atmosphere has changed in the last decade. For sure this isn’t limited to gardening magazines but a plethora of others on various subjects, though thankfully my two state related magazines Texas Monthly and Texas Highways continue to provide stellar journalism. It’s something you certainly have to search for.
Gardening books aren’t any better and you have to dig to find the ones that are worth reading. Being in the podcast world I was able to be put in touch with a couple of publishers a few years ago to get on their new release list. At first, this was thrilling—yay, free books! They would send out up and coming book lists and if you wanted an advanced copy you could request one or use their digital preview to review it. After about a year I came to realize that there is a constant churning out of beginner gardening books, targeting very similar topics. You can see this for yourself at any bookstore, too. These days they are often attached to social media influencers with varying degrees of quality and reliability of information. At some point in the near future I’ll write more about social media garden influencers, too. Now, there were some great books I did find through these publishers, don’t get me wrong, and several of those books turned into interviews on the podcast. But by and large, it was easy to tell that most of these books are churned out for that quick profit that the aforementioned social media influencer was going to give to the publisher. I get it—it’s a business!
Beyond very basic gardening books, let’s talk about the fancy gardening books, the ones with the gorgeous, eye-candy photos! These are the coffee table books, or the ones you dig out in bleak mid-winter to pilfer through and dream about spring and summer gardens full of blooms, where everything is neat or tidy. If it’s a book with some narrative to it, without fail there will be some talk about how the homeowner worked with a landscape architect to design the garden around the renovated beach cottage/restored 1800s homestead/secluded retreat in the mountains/cozy upstate NY estate because they, the homeowners, had recently moved away from the Big City. Occasionally you’ll get an idea of the background of the homeowners, but more often than not you have to guess at where the money came from to afford it all. No one ever speaks about the maintenance involved. Are these homeowners pulling the weeds themselves? Or do they have a crew of people to maintain it every week or month? Is there a professional gardener behind the scenes coming in to do maintenance every so often? I know that not everyone who wants a beautiful garden is actually a gardener but it’s disingenuous not to disclose those details in these books. It would be revolutionary for pricing to be included in these garden showcase books: cost of design, cost of plants, cost of installation, cost of maintenance, who maintains it, etc. Anyone who gardens and does the work themselves knows the true cost in both monetary and physical value. It’s a lot! And certainly those of us with full time jobs, children or elders to care for, health issues preventing us from being in our gardens often, know that gardens don’t take care of themselves and it doesn’t take long for maintenance to be needed.
I for one would love to see a couple of things change in the garden book publishing industry. First, Truth in Advertising—more disclosure in the costs and maintenance involved in these gardens being showcased. Second, where are the garden showcase books for the suburban gardens designed and maintained by the homeowners themselves? Because they do exist and I know quite a few people who have magnificent gardens and have done all of the work themselves.
As for garden magazines, I would love to see a thick quarterly be developed, some kind of indie-garden magazine in the vein of Bitter Southerner or Mergoat or heck, I’d take Garden Design getting back into the print magazine business. Sure, we may be paying $25 an issue but the writing quality won’t be endless drivel derived from repurposed blog posts or Instagram captions and the writers would be paid. Please, someone develop this idea! Is there actually a quality gardening magazine out there worth reading? Please share if you know of one!
In my own gardening world: the paths are full of weeds; I didn’t put mulch down in a couple of beds this year which means more weeds; there are gaps in plantings; the cactus bed is full of grass; I have more native seedlings than I know what to do with; and I cannot stay on top of ripening tomatillos. I think most of you can relate. And that’s all I’m asking for here, relatable, quality content.
With that I’ll end with a couple of good gardening books I’ve read in the last year and I hope you’ll reply back to my email or comment here on Substack with a book you recommend.
Saving the Wild South: The Fight for Native Plants on the Brink of Extinction by Georgann Eubanks - while not a gardening book per se, it’s about plants and it’s fantastic!
Wild Plant Culture: A Guide to Restoring Edible and Medicinal Native Plant Communities by Jared Rosenbaum
American Roots: Lessons and Inspiration from Designers Reimagining Our Home Gardens by Nick McCullough - this was pretty good but it still misses some marks for some quite fancy gardens that clearly took more money and time than a typical middle class person would be spending. Benjamin Vogt’s garden is showcased and a couple of other smaller gardens which is what redeemed it for me.
Louisiana Herb Journal: Healing on Home Ground by Corinne Martin
I hope everyone finds some time to pull a few weeds this weekend but also enjoy relaxing outside, too!
Misti writes regularly at Oceanic Wilderness and On Texas Nature and can be found on Instagram at @oceanicwilderness. She hosts two podcasts, Orange Blaze: A Florida Trail Podcast, and The Garden Path Podcast.
I still pine for Garden Design magazine to make a comeback. But it had a very specific audience. One that was not your beginner gardener but rather had more experience and was interested in design and ideas. I question the need for more beginner gardening books/articles when we have so much on the internet these days. Yet beginner gardeners are so darn important for our future, gardening being the gateway drug to caring about our ecosystems, etc. ;-) I personally liked American Roots. No matter the cost of a landscape I can almost always get an idea or two out of reading about them and looking at the eye candy. But nothing beats seeing a garden in person. That’s why I try to go on a garden tour, like The Fling, every year. Plus it’s nice to hang with my kind of people.