We sell gardening magazines in our physical store, although it's not always easy to find them. We asked Penny Hartley, a practising artist, designer and the keen gardener at Magalleria, to take us through them.
Magalleria doesn’t have a lot of gardening or horticultural magazines right now, if it ever has. This isn't from a lack of trying but because there aren’t many garden publications currently out there in indie mag world and a lot of the slack at Magalleria is taken up with books on the subject. Hence the following round-up of magazines includes one-off zines, garden and landscape-themed issues and features, and publications that overlap or stray into the area. All of these highlight the fact that we can still offer quite different approaches and unexpected connections to those of your standard gardening publications, so read on.
First we have HORTUS, which is widely considered to be the finest gardening periodical in the UK, a thoughtful journal aimed at people looking for informed and accessible discussion, essays and reviews. Now in its 40th year, each issue offers a gentle excursion through gardens, plants, literature, history, design and ornament as well as a valuable introduction to important names in horticulture, past and present. Sadly HORTUS will publish its last issue in late 2026, but it will remain timeless and collectable.
In contrast, both The Plant and Blumenhaus explore the world of plants through photography, fashion, art and craft, in the form of inspirational large format publications. The Plant launched in 2011 and celebrates all things plant and horticulture, living up to its description as a 'pleasure garden, promising something unexpected at every turn'. Blumenhaus, the more recent kid on the block, is where art meets botany, mixing contemporary visuals and antique botanic archives with a luxurious look-book feel to the magazine.
The publishers of Pleasant Place describe it as a 'growing collection of publications about the art of gardening’ – with art being the operative word. Each issue is dedicated to a single gardening topic and includes interviews, features, art, recipes and miniature models to cut out and make. It’s also usefully bound using loop staples to allow the series to be collected in a binder. Playful, bold and graphic, the balance of serious and fun in these collectable magazines will appeal to designers and garden-lovers alike.
Garden of Sorts examines our relationship with nature through a range of fresh perspectives and dialogues with artists, academics and cultural ecologists. Features and essays include the benefits of 'spontaneous' or 'wild urban' vegetation (or weeds to you and me), folklore and mythology around flowers, and community garden and forest-planting.
The bookish Our Hillsides are a series of volumes (there are four) that take us to hills of Florence and the villas and gardens of an influential group of expatriate women and their partners between 1890 and 1950. In Mary Berenson's Villa I Tatti (Vol 1) and Princess Ghyka & Miss Florence Blood's Gamberaia (Vol 2), both owners not only oversaw the extensive landscaping of their gardens (which can still be visited today) but their lives as neighbours also became intertwined.
Imagine5 (Vol 5) is not a garden magazine but you might want to catch the fifth issue which zooms out on gardening to look at rewilding and why green is good for us. It includes a delightful feature on offbeat Hollywood comedy actor Zach Galifianakis and his Netflix show 'This is a Gardening Show’ in which he discusses the joys of compost and why he wants to teach the world to grow stuff.
If you’ve ever felt a bit daunted by the mere prospect of growing something of your own, then Evergreen is for you. This is a volume by frankie that stands alongside the main magazine for 'the gardening curious’. It caters for gardens of all sizes, whether that’s a shelf of indoor plants, balcony veggie patches, courtyard pots or shared and community gardens. Evergreen gathers seeds of wisdom from the experts, bringing you accessible gardening guides, plant care advice and inspiration for a blooming backyard.
And finally, when does garden design become landscape design? There is no definitive threshold, and it's not always even about scale, but both involve working with nature. Scape is a semi-academic magazine from The Netherlands that provides new and original thinking around landscape design by highlighting designers and projects around the world. Packed with visuals and now attractively designed in a smallish paperback format, it managed to extend its appeal beyond landscape architects, designers and professional practitioners to the landscape curious.