Gardens Illustrated is 30 years old this year.
I have a first copy, dated April/May 1993. It came out every two months from then.
That was a real, delightful game changer! I wonder who else remembers that first edition?
American readers may be pleased to note that they are there in this very first edition:
The publishers were definitely after the American market. In the August/September edition there is also a Letter from America. ( by who? I can’t make it out)
You may like to read the Gardens Illustrated’s ‘facts and figures of Gardening in The Nineties’.
And here are the magazine contents:
It all makes fascinating reading, and it is full of gorgeous photographs (five pages of garden tools, posing in casual splendour looking totally unlike the contents of our toolshed.)
You’ll find an article headed “Think twice before you mow” by Stephen Anderton, which may make you think I am accidentally referring to a current ‘no mow’ edition, but in fact it tells us that thirty years ago garden writers were banging the very same drums.
I loved this magazine. It was just what I needed all that time ago, as I struggled to create the Veddw garden. There were features like the ‘Design Brief’ written just for people like me – the first edition has a piece on ‘the design principles involved in creating a path’, which so usefully took us beyond the simple ‘how to’.
What is most striking to me is the relative absence of garden designers.
This is especially interesting because I predicted to myself that the early editions would celebrate and write for amateur garden makers, and indeed my researches appear to bear this out.
Note the cover: four people mentioned there: Penelope Hobhouse, Anna Pavord, Beth Chatto, Anthony Sampson. (Three women!) Penelope Hobhouse is the only professional designer, and she began as an amateur garden maker, transforming to designer by way of garden making and writing, as indeed did Rosemary Verey, who appears on the cover of the June/July edition.
In these last 30 years I have observed the rise and rise of the garden designer in the UK. Once, the garden stars were those struggling alone with their own patches, encouraged by the wonderful examples of gardens also created by their owners and featured in places like Gardens Illustrated. They would appear, in this and other glossy magazines, describing how they had started with a bramble blighted wilderness and made this photo worthy garden out of it. “When I first saw this little derelict house, I more or less dismissed it as too daunting a task to take on at my age…” Mrs Sean Cooper in The New Englishwoman’s Garden. This has almost all gone from the British garden world. Nowhere demonstrates this better than current editions of Gardens Illustrated. Here are the contents of the current edition:
Each one of those “Places” involve garden designers. I thought there was a rogue in St. Timothee garden, principally the creation of Sarah Pajwani, I thought. But no – up pops the design company Acres Wild, as in “Sarah briefed Acres Wild to design”…
Design is now featured as ‘the latest projects from around the world’ and you can be sure that no amateur garden makers’ efforts will feature there:
And amongst the designers, the professional gardeners also appear – head gardeners like Tom Coward of Gravetye Manor, Matthew Pottage, Wisley’s curator, Helen Watt, RHS Bridgewater horticulturalist, Asa Gregers-Warg, head gardener at Beth Chatto’s. Stephen Anderton (garden maker and writer) has been replaced by ‘Head Gardener Benjamin Pope’.
When I began making a garden I loved the books written by those who wrote about their experiences doing the same thing.
Garden makers creating their own gardens with a spade and probably not much cash. Penelope Hobhouse wrote, in her great book The Country Gardener: “The approach I advocate was partly dictated by the practical situation in which I was then placed, with a neglected seven acre garden to restore and afterwards manage with very little help.” Seven acres is quite a big bit, but the experience was shared and made sense, as did that of Margery Fish: “I can’t think how I avoided turning an ankle as I had to clutch my skirt with one hand and use the other for the watering can while the stones rocked and tipped under my weight.” Who else gave me friendly, helpful company? Anne Scott-James, Felicity Bryan, Robin Lane Fox (if not terribly friendly, very helpful), Marian Cran, Sara Maitland, Peter Osborne, Christopher Lloyd, Beth Chatto, Peter Thompson, Vita Sackville-West, and many more: all real gardeners.
I was transportless in rural Wales – I didn’t get to meet anyone at that time doing the same thing as me until one close friend came along. But I did have all these people I admired and who made me feel it was good to take garden making seriously, to aim high, and fail in good company. I don’t think garden designers are in the same ball game – their own gardens inevitably often suffer from time short neglect or grow in the hands of other professionals. Professional gardeners, horticulturalists and their staff are usually dedicated more to maintenance than creation, and their employers tend to call the shots. A truly great and interesting garden for me is one created from personal expression.
Are we no longer capable of designing, planting and caring for our own gardens? Do we all need to call in ‘experts’ who will know how to garden our plots better than we do?
Do you think we have gained by this change?
Or perhaps it has not yet impinged outside the UK? (I think America features a bit less in Gardens Illustrated these days). Do we want to hear more or less exclusively from professionals? And if we do, what does this mean for the British tradition of the great personal garden?
Over the past 30 years I think the magazine has inspired those of us interested in practicing both design and gardening to imagine that designing residential gardens and landscapes for others as a profession was possible. At least, that’s what it did for me.
I’m glad that it did that for you, – but do you think that’s a complete and totally useful aim for the magazine, justifying its change of emphasis?
I would be disappointed if it had stayed the same. The pendulum will hopefully swing back and rest in the middle allowing exceptional gardens and ideas from both sides. It doesn’t have to be one or the other to inspire (and sell copies!)
I’m not sure what would make it swing. That swing has swung and designers and professionals star everywhere in the UK.
I think the writer of that Letter from America was Paula Deitz.
Thanks!
I’ll have to be careful here, as Anne’s has inspired my own rant. Yes this has happened in the USA. Since the 90s we have seen the demise of useful design and horticulture magazines and newsletters, and their resurrection either as slick coffee table tomes featuring very boring properties of very wealthy people, or watered down pablum spooned out to readers who seemly are too dumb to appreciate writing that is not achingly sweet (NOTE: Scott, present company excepted, and Horticulture does seem to be gamely hanging on in the midst of publisher consolidation and whatever other dynamics are going on out there). It’s all in the economics, unfortunately. Hence my appreciation for GardenRant, which seems to have found a way to support itself and its writers without going to the least common denominator.
A nice counterweight to all this is the Garden Conservancy, which Frank Cabot co-founded, that is all about gardeners (read, not landscapers) sharing their decades-long efforts with the public during Open Days in spring and summer. It has grown across the country, so if you are lucky you live in an area that has a bit of a gardening culture and you can visit these people’s gardens and see how they approached the design and horticulture situations that you face. Also, local garden clubs and neighborhood associations.
Depressing, though good to hear of growth of open gardens. And glad to hear Rant is filling a useful place there. Being free to write seriously is a wonderful pleasure.
Seems like the nonprofessionals have more of an internet presence on blogs and utube videos.
Could be. What do we make of that?
No gate keepers.
Does quality suffer?
One needs to shop around. There are many good ones, depending on what the gardener is interested in Always room for more. I think you would do an excellent YouTube channel.
The Impatient Gardener and Grow It Build It on youtube are two of my favorite gardeners. Just everyday normal people doing their yard and sharing the ups and downs with amazing honesty. Their no frills information is easy to relate to and their experience, I think The Impatient Gardener is a Master Gardener, is invaluable.
And on Garden Rant there’s a place for just us plain gardeners to post.
True.
Hello Anne,
I can only talk about UK magazines but I do agree with your comment. Both Garden Illustrated and English Garden (which I enjoy reading, but I would class as aspirational) tend to feature gardens designed and managed by professionals. That tends to leave garden makers to magazines such as Gardeners World and the Garden as well sometimes. These tend to focus on small urban gardens, which is great for me as I identify with them but its rare that the magazines named will describe anything bigger, but maybe that just reflects property prices in the UK?
PS Some of those projects in the “design” section of GI are really landscape design by numbers. Last month described a park with .”dancing fountain jets” every civic open area in a city in the UK has them now.
Hi Shaun – yes, it was a bit snobby of me to leave out consideration of Gardener’s World, Garden News and so on, but I wanted to be brief and coherent. Small urban gardens can, of course, shine as brilliantly as any.
And, yes, I think Gardens Ill rather specialises in landscape design by numbers!
I absolutely agree with you! I grew up as a gardener with Lloyd,Chatto and Fish and it was the practical,real information based on personal experience that made the difference.
If you look at the non- designer publications though, the opposite is true; I’m thinking of the RHS garden magazine,Gardeners world,etc. They’re so dumbed down – they appear to think that anyone not professionally involved is an absolute beginner,or only viewing gardens in the interim between lunch and cake!
Whilst blogs are great, there’s not the heft or breadth of a well written book or longer magazine article.
I think it’s time for you to write about Veddw!
Isn’t it a nostalgia trip, thinking of those people? I think I am about to start re-reading much of my garden library. I have been told before now by a garden magazine editor that advertisers like them to write for beginners, because beginners are the ones spending money on tools and equipment.
I would love to write a book about Veddw, with glorious photos (by professional photographer who’s sitting opposite me right now) and much stuff about making and maintaining four acres by ourselves with one day a week in the summer’s help……(as if)
An interesting idea. In my modest-yet-immodest library are a few books by some people who were authors but most definitely not professional gardeners; Arthur Tysilio (A.T.) Johnson (primarily author and gardener), Jason Hill (pseudonym for the physicist Dr. Frank Anthony Hampton), and even that most venerated of names E.A. Bowles. The first and last of the trio wrote professionally about gardening while Hill did it for a bit of fun, but primarily these were people writing about their experiences in their own gardens. And enjoyable books they wrote too.
Horticultural media has, in the past, flirted with the nurseries as sources of content to fill pages. Nurseries had carte blanche to write about their favourite plants in magazines. (I’ll let you in on a little trade secret; a nurseryman’s favourite plant is either his most expensive plant or the one he’s got rather a lot of to be rid of.) Then around the early 2000s a load of fancy new garden designers appeared and they were the hot new thing. Media likes, and very much still likes, garden designers; they make pretty gardens and tend not to look too haggard, weather-beaten or dirty in photographs. The other big appeal with garden designers is the money element; a designer might knock out a fairly modest job for the sort of money a nursery might earn in a whole year! As modern media is keen on selling aspiration the designers became the ‘cool kids’. What unites both designers and nursery owners is they’re not using column inches to inform, they’re using them to promote and sell themselves, their services and/or products.
There are a few celebrity gardeners, tending to become celebrities because they’re doing their jobs in popular gardens, where the fruits of their labours are viewed by so many (and their budgets for projects attract garden journalists like wasps to a picnic. In the meantime a great number of talented gardeners and garden makers, both professional and amateurs, never get their moment in the sun.
A knowledgeable and perceptive addition. Yes.
While much of GI is aspirational eye candy, I do find it helpful to see what the pros are doing. Many of them are at heart gardeners, or at least the ones I’m interested in. It would be pleasant to see more high level non-pro great gardens given attention. I most appreciate/respect the aesthetics and character of gardens that grow from both the maker’s personal obsessions and their actual hands on labor.
Yes, I rate above all the garden made by a sensitive individual with hands on and eyes on the process daily, with a spark of originality and a love of beauty and simplicity.
Beautifully said
Thanks!
It’s happened here in USA too. Many magazines and books feature professionally designed, installed, and maintained gardens. Occasionally the owner admits to not even knowing what the plants are. Rather than inspiring us “do it ourselves on a limited budget’ gardeners, they leave us depressed by unobtainable grandeur.
The contemporary garden press is promoting gardening as the pastime of the upper classes. one reason blogs and Instagram are popular is that they allow us to share our modest, quirky, work in (endless) process gardens.
I do love the sections of the Gardener’s World tv show that feature home gardens lovingly created and maintained by their owners.
Interesting to hear that America is going the same way. Not cheering.
I suspect that dedicated home gardeners often find inspiration and celebration by sharing home grown garden ideas and enthusiasm with their peers. Garden clubs give us this gift of community. Although I enjoy and learn from reading books and magazines, I find the most joy in visiting home designed gardens, marveling at their creativity, seeing plants that are new to me, and watching the changes that are made over time. Home gardeners often have quirky design preferences and unusual plants; so interesting. Thank you, Anne for sharing your delightful garden.
If the pros really are artists that make us think and do a double take because they employ unusual design/plant selections and juxtaposition, I do value learning about their work. If they are producing predictable, placeholder design, it is not so interesting.
Well, I’m certainly not against seeing the work of a great designer. Just not sure that I want the professionals to elbow the rest of us out.
Do we now need a name for the variously referenced here – personal garden, home garden, amateur garden, real garden……. ?
I find that much of the content has become quite formulaic but perhaps that’s because I have been reading these mags for 30+ years and am not a beginner any more. I don’t know.
Slightly off topic but I have been re-reading some of the books I began with, written by some of the garden makers whose names have been mentioned above. I have a stack of those mid-90s Frances Lincoln books by Verey, Hobhouse, Lees-Milne, Lord and so on. Rosemary Verey talks about trying to fix a visual error where a line of pleached trees lined up with the wall but the wall didn’t line up with anything else and there was a slope. Answer: plant a second row parallel to the first and fix the offending slant with clever pruning. This is the sort of thing I wanted and want. Design advice to help when confronted by the real-world problems of wonky walls, slopes and so on which most of us (want or have to) design and garden around, rather than flatten, terrace and recontour. A designer would never have made that mistake but an ordinary amateur gardener would. As I write this, I suddenly recall you writing something similar about hedges on slopes, and planting another one below the first and allowing to fill in, to give the same effect as a terrace and change of level. This sort of thing is almost entirely lacking in garden media now. I still buy the mags though!
That’s just my point about what we’ve lost regarding garden making and design. What designer is going to write about their mistakes in a glossy magazine, or even a glossy book? Nor could they discuss things which they may not have done ‘properly’ but which solve a problem.
We do have the freedom of the internet to explore all this – as we are doing. So perhaps we should be leaving the glossy magazines to the professionals.
Hmmm, your comment about leaving the glossy mags to the professional designers makes me wonder how much the current costs of producing a print magazine have influenced what goes in them…it’s certainly less expensive and more accessible to produce or access online these days.
They tend to do that as well. (online) Well, you might have thought that would encourage them to widen their appeal.
Thank you Anne for sharing your 30-year old magazine with us. Fascinating to see my early teachers names (whose books are in my bookcase) on the contents page. It was through older gardeners in my neighborhood, garden clubs,and books that I bought that helped me learn to maintain and improve inherited landscape of my home of 45 years.
As an aside, I was a member of Garden Conservancy for awhile. I became disappointed in their mission of resurrecting gardens of the wealthy and offering trips to same. And Open Days seemed to favor the Northeast U.S. most years.
Thanks, Mary, and it is interesting to hear about America. You are beating us, at 45 years!
I’ve recently let my subscription lapse. Between the mail service in both countries, I was getting my summer issues in winter and my spring issues in autumn, etc. for the last two years. Call me shallow, but I need a bit of seasonal urgency to get me to sit down and read a magazine at this point. For the price we pay here, getting the magazine 3-5 months late is ridiculous.
I have loved the Dig In Plantspersons plant selections by Keith Wiley, Tom Coward, Jimi Blake, etc… (particularly as they don’t shy away from botanical nomenclature, as we tend to here); and the in-depth genus profiles. And I also appreciate the one page Garden Talent profile as they aren’t Hollywood glossy (though usually head gardeners). I, like many commenters above, enjoy seeing good design, and have made note of gardens worth visiting by arrangement in future, but I am growing weary of boiler plate articles both here and in the UK that could be written by a computer with a silver spoon lodged in its hard drive.
“When they moved into their [farmhouse/cottage/falling down manor home], [Ian & Sophie/David & Matthew/Emma & Priyanka] knew they needed help to tame the [two acres/twenty acres/extensive grounds] that surrounded the Grade II listed home in the heart of the [Wiltshire/Oxfordshire/Surrey] countryside. With busy lives split between London and [insert relative county] the couple didn’t know where to start. Enter [insert designer]. The relationship has been nothing short of miraculous ….etc …etc..etc..”
Am I close? The preceding paragraph assumes they name the owners, which they often don’t.
Lack of a compelling story is what makes me skim these articles (which I don’t like to do). When these gardens can all be fit into some version of the above template, it doesn’t compel the amateur garden maker to keep reading. It doesn’t always have to be the hero’s journey, but interesting, actionable, ACCESSIBLE, elements keep us engaged.
All that said, there was a good article on a couple’s 40 year self-made organic garden in Powys (Nant-y-Bedd) built by the owners in the April 2022 issue, and such articles do make an appearance here and there. Been there? Know them? And, some ‘designers’ are just as much gardeners as you or I, but they have been clever enough to see the writing on the wall and insisted on the title. Doesn’t make them less of a gardener.
As an aside, a home and land is getting harder to purchase by the day here, but I wonder if American gardener-readers understand how much cash needs to be forked over to afford a half an acre with a semi-detached house (duplex in America), much less a sweet cottage with attached extensive grounds – particularly in relation to UK salaries. I look at estate agent windows when I’m in the UK and am absolutely blown away by the price of homes now, and I live outside of Washington DC! Anyway, far too long of a comment Anne, but great post – excellent points all. I suppose the magazine is simply doing what it needs to do to survive. Bit of this. A whole lotta that. – MW
Hi Marianne, and thanks for this. I think for us in the UK the plantspersons are very much the Same old Same olds telling us much the same old things – which is possibly a whole different post. I recently read someone celebrating the freedom that writing a Substack gives: he then went on to publish an interview with another Same old Same old. Tim Richardson did the same kind of thing, years ago, with New Eden, which, not therefore being so new, died.
I love that computer with a stuck silver spoon – spot on.
And we do know our neighbours at Nant-y-Bedd. My wish is that that piece should stop being a notable exception and return to being the principle feature and focus of magazines like Gardens Ill.
You are so right about the price of house and land now, and maybe that’s an important factor. Our lane has steadily gentrified during our 36 years here, and whereas that is better than a rise in poverty, it does illustrate a dramatic change in people’s possibilities. Maybe there are just not many of us making new gardens with our own spades and ideas….
I find it hard to relate to the prevalent idea that design and implementation are an event not a process. I am not only the designer but the entire labour force for my garden, and at this rate it will be two or three decades before the garden looks anything like what I have in mind, as the dream evolves and the reality slowly takes shape.
But so much of what is presently written about garden-making tends to assume it’s a thing you (or more likely contractors) do in one big push, and then that’s it until you decide you want to refresh with a redesign. The living growing changing nature of plants seems overlooked or irrelevant. To my mind, that’s less like gardening and more like interior design that happens to be outdoors. No doubt that is what some people are after, but it’s no substitute for gardening, for those who actually want to garden.
It’s also not really possible. I remember Robin Lane Fox saying no garden was worth seeing until it’s ten years old. At ten years old ours was hardly happening. You are right – half the problem with this emphasis on designers is that they are not, and can’t be, part of this slowly evolving process.
I do wonder if the popularity of “makeover” TV shows is connected to what has happened to gardening magazines in terms of things being an Event rather than a Process. I’m thinking of shows like Garden Rescue which was on one of the streaming services (I forget which) recently. I’ve never had any interest in the home-makeover shows because they are ridiculously unrelated to real-world experiences, but I watched Garden Rescue out of curiosity as to what plants were being used, compared to here in the USA. The premise is the same, though: “You too can have a quick fix entire-garden makeover, from soup to nuts, in less than a week…as long as you can afford to pay someone else to do it.” That’s not how things work in my world, LOL
I finally stopped subscribing to any gardening magazines about a dozen years ago, for that very reason: They all seem to be either for rank beginners, or are brag-books for homeowners who brought in a designer. There is little or no middle ground. Full disclosure: Back in the 1980s, I was a freelance garden writer and sold articles to various publications both in the USA and the UK. My focus was never overall garden design, but rather were overviews of certain plants (or plant genera) as well as the personal “here’s what I did with such-and-so part(s) of the garden” experience-based articles that others here have cited. After my son was born I had less and less time for writing, but I could also see that the content of the magazines that I had previously written for was beginning to change – and not in a way that appealed to the knowledgeable, but middle-income, gardening nerd like myself. It was dispiriting, to say the least.
It is dispiriting, and I think that the makeover thing definitely must contribute to the idea that making a garden is beyond the hoi polloi like us.
I started out several years ago believing that I could design my own garden and jumped into learning design. A few years in, I decided that the idea that a homeowner could design their own garden was wrong. How could an amateur come close to a professional? I decided homeowners should just always hire a designer for the overall layout, even if they did individual bed planting plans themselves. I did keep going on my own garden design because I had come so far. But now that I read this post, I wonder if my conclusion was just the result of reading too much gardeners illustrated!
(Note to those who suffer from the mail delay for Gardens Illustrated: they have an app— I read it only electronically.)
Great! Maybe you should come and have a look at a totally amateur effort? https://veddw.com/ !