Well, if you are, Horticulture is not the magazine for you. You'd best start out with another publication that caters to inexperienced gardeners. I'd suggest Organic Gardening, offered by Rodale. Subscribe to such a magazine for a year and then try Horticulture out.
Are you a garden prude?
Well, if you are, Horticulture is definitely for you. This magazine seems designed for those who think of gardening as a club with recognized leaders who know best. There are rules in the Horticulture gardening club: a right way and a wrong way.
The truth is that almost all gardeners think this way, even those who advocate a completely organic, habitat-friendly way of doing things (perhaps I should say that rules are important especially for these types). Horticulture simply aligns itself with traditional, agricultural school ways of thinking about growing plants. Its editors have a bit more panache, but just a bit more.
One of the most consistent weaknesses of Horticulture is that many of its articles are not articles at all, but merely lists of recommended varieties of plants with a few sentences of narrative pasted at the beginning and the end. I'm not denying that many gardeners want to know the difference between cultivars, but such information is best presented in charts, not in paragraph form. When I read some of these articles, I'm reminded of the most boring parts of Genesis, where the species clematis begat the cultivars henryii and gardenii...
Still, I keep my subscription to Horticulture current. Every now and then the editors let a real writer contribute an article, and the results are well worth reading. The best example I can think of is The New German Style by Stephen Lacey in the March 2000 issue. Instead of listing new hybrids, this article describes an approach to gardening which is radically different from that traditionally practiced in the United States, one in which plants are allowed to grow as they would naturally, in communities planted in relatively infertile soil. Writers like Lacey understand that gardening is most compelling because of the relationship that it creates between gardeners and the earth, not because of the opportunities for collection it provides.
With more articles like this one, Horticulture could become a truly fantastic magazine. If you have the experience and the patience to put up with short-sighted attention to picky details, go ahead and get a subscription. If not, I suggest another magazine, or better yet, a visit to the library or the internet for some good free sources of the information you need.
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