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Customer Reviews of Fine Gardening

Five Stars from a Landscape Designer
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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>Recommended.

My second favorite gardening magazine.....
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. <
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>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. <
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>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. <
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>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). <
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>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). <
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>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. <
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>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"? <
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>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). <
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>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. <
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>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). <
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>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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