JANUARY / FEBRUARY 1999

Welcome to the indoor hiatus from winter—our mid-winter look at gardening. We bring you the idea-filled cover story on our annual contest winners, this year concentrating on solutions to shade and/or ponds. For the fourth year now, managing editor Carolyn Ulrich has pointed her Saturn one way and I have pointed my Saturn another direction to visit with as many contestants as possible. We hope to make some friends along the way as well, as we both have in Wes Gilbert, whose personality can’t be bottled on a mere magazine page. Or as I made in visiting John and Jeanette Rottersman where I learned a whole lot about how much work it takes to keep a pond looking immaculate.

While you may have come to expect the contest article in the first issue of the new year, you will find that we have not settled into a comfortable niche in our other offerings. We’re starting a new series of articles, “Chicago by Design,” that is a feature in this issue and will become a regular department in future issues. Its goal is to help you visualize how you can help design your landscape. We are on the leading edge of the new century with our “Vintage Views” department, which takes a look back at gardening trends and tidbits throughout the past century. And we’re making our occasional “Potpourri” department a permanent addition as well. It will be a repository for those interesting factoids that usually get left out because they aren’t easy to classify.

Our core contents remain. We don’t want to stray from our mission of supplying localized gardening information, so Ron Wolford of the University of Illinois Extension Service again provides us with a checklist of things to do during these months, we look at a native plant in the bur oak, we answer your questions, and Kate Jerome continues her essays. We do have one new byline this issue, Michelle Byrne Walsh, who writes about indoor garden tools. Her work is often seen in the Landscape Contractor, published by the Illinois Landscape Contractors Association, and she will write several of our GreenShopper articles during the upcoming year.

And speaking of our core, we bring you the first look at this year’s Chicago Flower & Garden Show at Navy Pier. We’re certainly biased when it comes to this show. It means a lot to our gardening community to have a show that is working as hard as this one to spread the word of gardening to the public. We’re there too, publishing and then selling the Show Guide that we try to make an indispensable part of your visit to Navy Pier. And speaking of visiting, make sure to plan to find our booth. We enjoy meeting you.

And finally, we’d like to update you on a far-flung Chicagoland gardener. I met Pat Fisher in a master gardener class and discovered her training as an artist. When we started the magazine, she pitched in to illustrate several articles with her sketches. Her husband had the opportunity to take a position in the Netherlands, so Pat and their two daughters moved there a few years ago. She’s still there, as you might have guessed, and probably will stay another three years to get the youngest through high school. She says they’ve had to take a larger home since they filled up their other house by buying so many of the abundant antiques there. Her closing comment: “Boy! Has (the magazine) grown. I love each new issue. You should all be so proud.” Proud, yes, but that doesn’t satisfy a subscriber who expects better things each issue—something we’re working hard to provide.