JANUARY/FEBRUARY 1998

Congratulations to Harriet Kay Burnstein for being declared the Grand Prize Winner in our third annual Gardening in Small Spaces Contest. It's always a difficult decision to look at all the beautiful entries that come in and boil it down to just one person's garden. All of you who enter are truly winners for growing a garden that you feel is special enough to take photos of and send to us.

We judge the finalists' gardens by visiting them, always in late August, after their peak. Carolyn Ulrich, the managing Editor, and I go separately than get together and compare notes. This worked fine the first two years because each of us had roughly the same number of entries we thought should get the top spot. She argued successfully the first year, I was sufficiently persuasive the second. This year's contest was so difficult because Carolyn, who visited both of this year's top winners, had to debate with herself: the Burnstein garden is an early summer garden with many colorful perennials that didn't show as well late in the season as the lush foliage and groundcovers in the water garden of Dave DiCorpo and Jeff Rutter. Which was the better overall garden? In the end, only she could decide.

One of the fine gardens that I visited belongs to Sue Ladley and her husband David. A member of the Late Bloomers Garden Club, Sue had contracted me a week or so earlier to speak at a meeting. By the meeting date, the certificate Sue was receiving was ready, so I could present it to her in front of her fellow gardeners. The club is an avid group, so we had a fine give-and-take of ideas and potential solutions to their many concerns. Almost as an afterthought at the end of the meeting, I put in the plug for the magazine and told them that garden club members get a discount on subscriptions. Within minutes, the magazine had several new subscribers, a gift subscription or two and several renewals.

This is the kind of enthusiasm you can find in a garden club, so if you are not already a club member, consider joining one. Many community newspapers list meetings of clubs that welcome new members or you may know someone who belongs to one and would like to know of your interest in joining their club.

In addition to our contest, DiCorpo and Rutter received top honors in the City of Chicago's gardening contest. Many of those winners are listed on page 31 but we didn't have room to list winners in the multi-family segment, where Alice Joyce's garden won 1st place for Region 2. Alice is a frequent contributor to the magazine, most recently doing our Gift Guide in November/December. Congratulations to Alice!

In the adjoining column is the pro-forma information about us. This is Volume 4, Number 1, meaning the start of our fourth year of publication. Our planning for the year is light years ahead of where we usually are at this stage, many of the stories for 1998 have been photographed so we don't have to scramble around finding illustrations and we're (fingers crossed) soon online with our new website. Our company is also helping to start a new magazine, Chicago Wilderness, that debuted in November. And we're hard at work on the official Show Guide to the Chicago Flower & Garden Show coming in March. By staying busy with garden-related projects, we don't think about the weather quite so much.