May / June 1997

The show season is over and it's time to get into the dirt and play. The magazine was represented at five shows over a two-week period this spring, the largest being the Chicago Flower & Garden Show where we worked all nine days again this year, running a booth and selling the Official Show Guides that we publish. It is exhausting to be sure, but the opportunity to meet so many gardeners and especially to shake hands with so many subscribers helps make it worth the time investment. Thanks to all of you who stopped by with words of encouragement.

Wherever we go, we hear (and welcome) opinions. It seems that each show brings one person who looks through the magazine to make sure "there aren't too many ads." After leafing through a 300-plus-page copy of a major national magazine, I can see why that attitude might be out there. From the perspective of publishing this magazine, however, we spend an enormous amount of time and effort to attract advertising and make those advertisements look as appealing as possible. Why? To acquaint you with those businesses where you might do your garden shopping.

We can't push that attitude on you, but recently we received a letter that we should frame and give to any staffer making calls about advertising. It comes from a subscriber who says in part:

"Last spring with a copy of your magazine and a Chicagoland map in hand, a fellow gardener and I spent an entire day exploring new nurseries. The advertisements in your magazine were our guide to a delightful day. We returned with a trunkload of plants, planters, sore feet, and smiles on our facesThank you for making this excursion possible. We're looking forward to another trip or two this spring."

We're not the biggest magazine around so every letter like that is deeply appreciated. We want to provide that network of gardeners helping gardeners, whether it's through a how-to article in the magazine, a calendar listing telling you of an event in your neighborhood, or that advertisement bringing you in touch with a new shopping source. If you want to help us succeed, tell that garden center person you learned about their business from this magazine. Call an 800 number and get information offered in other ads and wherever there's a coupon, please send it in-those companies track response and our ability to have them continue their advertisement is related to how many coupons come back in the mail.

It's a complicated formula keeping everyone happy. You want more value for your subscription dollar, advertisers want more response to their message, and we want to publish the best gardening magazine we can.

Getting back to gardening, the curtain goes up on our third annual Gardening in Small Spaces Contest with the announcement on page 67. More than 70 of you responded to last year's call for entries and Managing Editor Carolyn Ulrich and I enjoyed meeting so many of you that we decided we would put all those miles on our Saturns again this year. Do you think the folks in Spring Hill, Tenn. would want to do an ad about garden contest judges arriving in their Saturns? Naw, that's too much to hope for