Cold Climate Gardening

Look at the hardiness map for Minnesota and you will see that the whole state is in zone 4 or colder. The Minnesota State Horticultural Society, which publishes Northern Gardener Magazine, is devoted to helping northern gardeners. If you join the society, besides the magazine you will get borrowing privileges at the society’s library (they mail you the books!), as well as other benefits that would mostly appeal to local members. Or, you can subscribe to the magazine alone.

This month’s issue featured an article on hardy magnolias, as well as a northern native (bloodroot in this issue), an article on hardier …

Popularity: 18% [?]

Horticulture Magazine has jumped on the blogging bandwagon. Managing Editor Meghan Lynch and Executive Editor Sara Begg are both giving it a whirl. At the moment, though, you can’t get to them from the website’s main page. How dumb is that? The only reason I even found them is because I subscribe to the email newsletter. Since they’re just getting started, I expect a link will be up there shortly.

You might say Meghan discovered me. She (anonymously) wrote a sidebar praising this blog in the spring of 2005, and offered me the chance to write the book reviews for the April 2006. …

Popularity: 12% [?]

Another magazine for northern gardeners is People, Places & Plants. This started out as a magazine for Maine gardeners, then expanded to cover all of New England. Checking their website before posting this link, I see they are about to start a second magazine for the Mid-Atlantic region. I haven’t actually seen an issue since the first year of its publication. At that point I found it to be a magazine worth browsing for the inspiration of other northern gardens, but not having enough how-to to make it worth paying for. Obviously they are doing well, so there must be plenty of people who do find them worth subscribing to.

I have also looked at Northern Gardener, the magazine …

Popularity: 4% [?]

Ah, November. A little time to breathe and do something besides the hard physical work of gardening. Like, read seed catalogs and go slightly mad with imagining all the things I’ll grow next year. And read gardening magazines–actually read them, not just flip through them and hope to remember them when there’s more time. My best favorite garden magazine is BBC Gardener’s World. The big glossy British magazine is obviously not cold-climate, but it is all in color, loads of photos, actually 12x a year, and many more pages than any of the US things. It is informative and good for the creative juices to see what people not in my neighborhood are …

Popularity: 5% [?]