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.
