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Fine Gardening | 
| Publisher: Taunton Press
Category: Magazine
List Price: $41.94
Buy New: $29.95
You Save: $11.99 (29%)
Rating:  12 reviews
Sales Rank: 386
Format: Magazine Subscription
Type: Trade magazine
Subscription Issues: 6
Subscription Length: 12 Months
Issues Per Year: 6
First Issue Lead Time: 12-16 Weeks
ASIN: B000063XJI
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 2 to 4 months
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| Editorial Reviews:
Amazon.com Review
Editorial Reviews Amazon.com 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 youre 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: Editors 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
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December, 2007 
February, 2008
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August, 2007
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February, 2007
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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 youll likely want to easily find the plants or tools that the editors are writing about. Included in each issues is an Advertisers 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.
Product Description
Hands-on advice, information and inspiration on garden design, intriguing plants, reliable techniques and practical landscaping projects.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 7 more reviews...
 Much info for learning gardeners July 11, 2008
This is a great magazine for someone who wants to know more in detail about specific topics in gardening. As a chairperson for a homeowners association I always want to learn more. Very informative without being too wordy. Lots of nice pictures.
 Good magazine but not what I thought it would be April 19, 2008
This magazine is about gardening, but it is not quite what I was hoping to find. The articles are interesting and the photography is is outstanding but since I was hoping to find plant articles that I could use in the Northwest I found it difficult to translate the articles for my own use. The magazine started coming much earlier than I had expected, which was a pleasant surprise.
 Thoroughly pleased March 19, 2006
5 out of 6 found this review helpful
I have enjoyed Fine Gardening for a year so gave it to myself for Christmas. It's helpful to re-read past magazines as something new pops out to me each time. Great to keep for reference.
Five Stars from a Landscape Designer February 5, 2006
16 out of 16 found this review helpful
I do landscape design and landscape maintenance professionally, and this is the only magazine I'd recommend to clients. As another reviewer noted, The American Gardener is also a fine publication if you are very serious about plants, but for most readers, Fine Gardening best walks the line between accessability and having great information.
I have been a subscriber for eight years and have kept every issue. The information on the spine is clear and so you can easily find that elusive article you remembered and wanted to refer to, without pulling out every issue and having to look at the cover.
As a professional, I find the in-depth articles on different kinds of plants really helpful. It is neat to focus on say, all the different kinds of Forsythias around, so you can really compare the varieties available and know all of your options if you would like to plant one. They usually have six or more photos of the different varieties, with each photo highlighting an important aspect of the plant's habit, foliage, or bloom, plus a few photos of the plants used in a garden, so you can see what kinds of textures and colors the plant works with.
The articles on landscape design are by well-respected professionals and offer a wonderful balance of intellectually interesting discussion and gorgeous photos. They don't always tell us exactly which plant is which in each photo, so that would be a drawback to the new gardener who isn't familiar with a number of plants, but they usually only neglect to name the plants when the photo is trying to illustrate a design concept. I think they find a good balance between urban gardening/ gardening in small spaces, and gardening in a more country or spacious setting.
They also have articles on seasonal care (and as a reader for eight years, I haven't found any articles that are overlap or repeats), articles on broader topics like groundovers for shade or grasses in the garden (in which they usually include a large and useful list of plants, organized by foliage and flower color, size, sun needs, zone, etc), and profiles on the latest tools, books and other gardening needs.
I have read a lot of gardening magazines over the years and Fine Gardening is by far the best. The language is simple yet the ideas are not dumbed down. Most other magazines have huge amounts of distracting advertisements, and Fine Gardening's are related to gardening, useful, and not too prolific.
Recommended.
My second favorite gardening magazine..... January 16, 2006
27 out of 29 found this review helpful
I have subscribed to FINE GARDENING for several years, and the only real problem I've encountered is where to house back issues. I have also subscribed to a number of other "gardening" magazines, most of them dropped after the initial subscription period. The exceptions have been THE AMERICAN GARDENER (my favorite gardening magazine) and FINE GARDENING.
Want information on design? You will find many ideas in FG but few are within the reach of the average pocketbook or space permitting. However, unlike other magazines I could name, FG does not limit it's coverage to landed estates or huge houses in Atlanta or Savannah, but covers homeowners all over the US in "regional" features, so occasionally urban gardens are covered.
A nifty thing about FG is that each spine indicates the contents, so as I look though my "stacks" I can find almost any topic covered. For example, the February 1995 issue featured "Hillside Gardens". "Ferns". "Garden Diaries" and "Vines". FG also includes several knowledgeable garden writers on its editorial board.
The downside for FG and many other gardening magazines is that over the years, the text of regular features and articles has been substantially reduced, while the number and size of photos associated with the articles as well as those of advertisers has increased (30 percent of the pages is covered with advertising in the current issue of FG).
If you are seeking first-hand experiences and not "McNuggets" sponsored by gas-guzzling garden tools, you will find fewer and fewer of them in most of the more comercial garden magazines (mags without a "botanical" society-based sponsor).
I am a great fan of photos, but photos have their downside too. I have been gardening a long time so I can look at a photo and usually identify the plants shown...but can every reader do this? Unfortunately, too many of the copy editors know nothing about gardening, thus, too often, the captions they have overseen for photos are misleading. FG does a pretty good job of avoiding this problem, but AG is the best.
The AMERICAN GARDENER tends to include essays by home gardeners (many in urban areas with small yard issues) rather than focusing on the travails of designers working on landed estates or home owners with comparatively large spreads (how many of us have a few dozen acres to "garden"?
AG also favors organic practices and reflects this in its advertising (the current January/February 2006 issue includes articles on "Earth-friendly weeding techniques" as well as "A Plant Buff's Guide to Plant Sales" and a side bar examining top "weed" problems in regional areas).
AG is very plant based and conducts "performance trials" of various new plant introductions, so you can benefit from the "on-the-job" hands-on experince of horticulturalists working at River Farm (HQ of AG) in the Eastern US (Alexandria VA), as well as learn about recent research by plant scientists from all over the US.
THE AMERICAN GARDENER is published by the American Horticultural Society and is the PBS of the gardening world -- comprehensive, in-depth, and earth-friendly (some advertisement but it does not overwhelm--about 12 percent in the current issue, and most of it on behalf of small and/or earth-friendly organizations).
If you can only afford one gardening magazine join the American Horticultural Association and receive their monthly magazine. If you can afford more than one, FINE GARDENING is also a good bet.
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