Big news from the GardenRant team!

New Design 

(L) Jim Charlier with Sally Cunningham, from Buffalo-Style Gardening. (R) Laura Bowly.

The GardenRant team is thrilled to announce that the site you’re on IS GardenRant – it just looks very different.

Original logo from 2006.

Our new logo was created by Buffalo-based marketing and graphics genius Jim Charlier (blogging at Art of Gardening), a friend to several of us at GardenRant. He’s well known in gardening circles for successfully promoting the gardens of Buffalo through Garden Walk Buffalo.

Jim adapted the original tools in our 2006 graphic to face inward, in an homage to the “Knives Out” movie poster, and updated the colors. We love it!

Next we hired web designer Laura Bowly in Bend, Oregon, who has a great portfolio and happens to be the sister of Ranter Marianne Willburn. Laura took Jim’s vision and applied it throughout a custom- designed site, creating more graphics as needed along the way.

Both Jim and Laura really get GardenRant, and we’re gobsmacked by the result. We feel it goes far beyond just looking better – our regular voices and guests are more prominent, and our 15 years of posts are much better organized. That’s right – this is our 15th year!  We’ll be talking more about our anniversary as the growing season gets underway.

New Voices 

But there’s more! We’ve selected, recruited and been joined by two of the most exciting voices in garden writing today.   

Dan Hinkley is well known in the gardening world here and abroad as an explorer, former owner of the Heronswood Nursery, the new garden-maker at Windcliff in Washington State, and author of Windcliff.

Dan’s first post for GardenRant is  Plant Explorer Ernest Wilson’s Sink is Going in my Garden. 

Anne Wareham is a British garden writer and author of The Bad Tempered Gardener, which makes her a perfect fit for the Rant.  Also on topic for us: she edits thinkinGardens.co.uk, which she describes as “challenging and provocative.”  

Anne’s first post for GardenRant is  Hi from the U.K. 

Dan and Anne are not only excellent writers with their own distinct voices; they give GardenRant a much greater geographic coverage, which is great for our readers!  

Coming Soon

For our RSS subscribers, we’ve heard the complaints and we’re taking action to get those ads off the emails you’re being sent.  Soon the new emails will include our lovely new banner, a featured photo, and the beginning of each post – and no ads.

Suggestions Welcome

If you have ideas for how we might make your experience at GardenRant even better, please let us know in a comment.