Christmas presents for gardeners

My other half gave me an unexpected Christmas present yesterday: a 12 month subscription to Kitchen Garden, a magazine about growing your own fruit and veg. He also bought me the January issue, as the subscription doesn't start till February.

It turns out that this is an excellent gift on a couple of fronts. Firstly, it's full of handy advice on how to grow different kinds of veg - things like when to plant and harvest various types of veg and how to look after your soil or make a propagator, along with articles that seem to be written by people with the same concerns as me (practical tips on how to grow veg and which varieties are most resistant to pests and disease and how and why people set up a community garden or started allotment gardening, rather than people reciting the scientific names* of various type of flower as if they should mean something to me). Secondly, the January issue came with a free packet of kale seeds (I love kale) and I'll be getting 20 more packets of seeds when the subscription starts as part of the offer.

This is an excellent present, although I'm not sure I'll have room for all of them in my garden.
A far less excellent magazine is The Garden:

I would be pretty annoyed if I'd paid the price listed on the cover (£4.25) for a copy of it, as it doesn't seem professionally written to me and also seems to assume that I have such a strong knowledge of gardening that practical tips are no use to me and what I'm mainly interested in is lists of the long names of plants. It often doesn't even have photographs of the most important thing an article's talked about (for instance having a photo of the columnist instead of their garden in winter or whatever the topic of their column was - the excellent photo on January's cover is not representative of the standard or choice of photos in the rest of the magazine).

I actually have the magazine because I joined the Royal Horticultural Society, as that's the cheapest way to visit RHS Wisley several times a year and you get the magazine delivered for free as part of that package. My guess is that the principal purposes of The Garden are actually to promote the RHS's gardens and partner gardens plus to sell garden-related holidays and greenhouses. Certainly, my main thoughts after reading it each month are generally: I must visit Wisley again, those garden holidays look lovely, shame about the price, and I wish I had room for a greenhouse, I'd love a Victorian one. I certainly don't recommend a subscription to The Garden for any gardener you've not actually heard list several scientific names of plants in a single sentence**. On the other hand, membership of the RHS is a great present for any gardener who lives near one of the RHS gardens (particularly RHS Wisley), as these are amazing gardens to visit - or at any rate, I can vouch for the fact that Wisley is. The membership just happens to comes with a subscription to The Garden thrown in, but that part they'll just have to grin and bear (at least it should remind them to make use of their membership and actually go for a visit).

* I used to call these the Latin names of plants until my friend who's a professional gardener pointed out that not all of theses names were actually Latin, so we were supposed to call them "scientific names".
** Quite a lot of people seem to think I'm the type to call plants by their scientific names. Life's too short. I mainly don't need to know the scientific names of what's growing in my garden, so I mainly don't bother.