If we could step back in time to flick through the pages of popular garden magazines from bygone eras, it’s safe to say that we’d find few if any features on rewilding, sustainability, environmentally conscious garden design or the rich biodiversity of brownfield sites. Instead, those popular publications typically dispensed traditional gardening advice on how to cultivate a range of choice plants and protect them from common pests and diseases. Some of it, unsurprisingly, hasn’t aged all that well.
Few of us, for example, would contemplate installing a stuffed cat among our flower beds to scare off destructive sparrows, as suggested in an early edition of Curtis’s the Botanical Magazine. Or dousing our rose plants with a solution of water and turpentine to kill off “mischievous grubs”. Their kind advice to use poisonous chemicals such as arsenic, sodium chlorate, simazine, paraquat, DDT, drins and neonicotinoids to control weeds, pests and diseases feels a million miles away from the planet we inhabit today. The same goes for well-meaning suggestions on how, for example, to achieve the perfect weed-free lawn, colourful carpet bedding displays, or heated glasshouses heaving with tropical fruit, all of them elements of a garden that we now know require intense maintenance and come at an unaffordable environmental cost. As we contemplate ways to combat climate change and grieve for the escalating loss of biodiversity, the world has moved on and gardeners with it.
So have those magazines’ modern counterparts including Gardens Illustrated, the well-known international gardening magazine often described as the horticultural equivalent of Vogue, whose Irish-born editor is Stephanie Mahon, the award-winning author and gardening
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