Editor’s note (2026):
I wrote this in 2009, before social media feeds, brand partnerships, and “content strategy” became the organizing logic of garden media. I’m resurfacing it because the incentives shaping how we talk about gardens—and design more broadly—haven’t changed. They’ve just scaled.
Here in the U.S., all things garden-related are, well… pretty much relegated to back corners of bookstores and odd hours on high-number channels on TV. Annoying—but I have to say, not entirely undeserved.
Seriously, I have a little rant about the general quality of the marketing and packaging of garden books and garden personalities. While we in the garden media have a lot to offer in the way of ideas and information, we generally suck at marketing ourselves to people outside the small garden and landscape design world.
We act like gardening is a private club—and you need the right vocabulary just to get through the door. I want to banish that and throw open the doors. I can’t wait to see rock-and-roll gardeners, younger generations, and green-minded souls start to change the image of gardening in this country—make it quirky, make it fun, make it a reflection of the individual.
I’m looking forward to a day when gardening is cool, hip, stylish, educated, and more than just trendy—an enduring change in how we live. All of which, I think, will require the media to feed it and help build it.
Garden media folks… I think we have our work cut out for us. And we need to step it up.
Ok. Rant over.
Enter Amy Stewart—writer and contributor to Garden Rant—and her book Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities.
It’s the whole package: cool cover art, interesting topics, and—at last—some humor and entertainment value in the marketing of a plant book. I mean, really—gardens, plants, design, growing, all of it—these are subjects that can be interesting to the masses. (Must I mention again that in England, some garden shows actually air in prime time?)
It just needs to be packaged correctly. Wicked Plants is a good first step. I could absolutely see an interesting TV show springing from this, couldn’t you?
Amy and her team at Algonquin Books deserve a stand-up round of applause for creative and clever marketing.
Even the press kit for Amy’s book looked good and felt “hip.”
i think most garden writing, especially the magazines are, in the words of Stephen Colbert (in describing Gov. Mark Sanford), like a vanilla folder on beige walls. It could use the gardening version of Anthony Boudain or David or Amy Sedaris.
Amy’s a great start.
Bravo! If we want to be taken seriously, and we should be as a design discipline, then we have to be about what people think is cool. I agree with Jim–we need to stop being so insular. Look at most gardening and landscape designers garden blog rolls–what do you see? More just like them. Common people! Let’s put it out there in the big wide world and find some rock stars to strut our stuff loud and raw.
from Fanclub Amy.
You rock! Definitely hip and spooky cool!
did you mention Oleander?
L.