Flop in a soft chair, thumb the pages and ponder that Hortus doesn’t exist in some electronic ether and that the only “cloud” this baby has gone through is a real one, in the mailbag of an airplane.
When David Wheeler started Hortus 25 years ago, he was an out-of-work newspaper guy in his 30s with a beginner’s blithe nerve to ask the lions of English garden writing to contribute to his first issue. They agreed, not for the modest fees but because they found an outlet to compose the sort of garden essays that wouldn’t fit other publications. This was at the threshold of the digital revolution, and even then the periodical was an anachronism.
The typeface (Wheeler abandoned hot metal type just six years ago) is from the 1930s and itself based on a font used for Dutch garden books in the 17th century. His model was the kind of quality travel journal found between the world wars.
“I went to see an accountant and he said, ‘Well, you’ll get a damn good year out of it.’ But I said it’s a subscription-only publication, and I can stop the moment the well dries up.”
Luckily the water still flows. Hortus has survived a generation not because it is quaint but because it delivers for its subscribers. On its face, it may seem odd to publish a periodical of words about a subject that is primarily visual. But there is a natural affinity between gardening and the written (or spoken) word, and it all comes down to storytelling. A garden is a narrative waiting to be told. If you sit around a table of gardeners, you see that there is nothing more animated than a gardener describing a newly discovered plant or garden.
Wheeler has a motto that Hortus “is for gardeners who read and readers who garden.” Twenty-five years on, the subscription list runs to a modest 2,000 readers in 30 countries, making it its own little worldwide web from its base in western England.
The current issue, No. 100, echoes No. 1 by including several of the original luminary scribes: Jane Brown, Stephen Lacey, John Brookes and Penelope Hobhouse. Hobhouse, now a retired garden designer, writes of working for — and with — a certain design-driven client in Palo Alto, Calif. Steve Jobs “believed that a simple solution was the best inside an overall unity of purpose. When I talked to him about his garden he could translate these hypotheses into landscape terms. . . . Above all, solutions should be logical.”
It is one of 20 articles, to be savored in separate sittings.
Wine expert and writer Hugh Johnson recounts a letter from an environmental agency complaining that the bars on his garden cave were vertical. “ ‘You may be unaware that bats prefer horizontal bars.’ I admit,” he writes, “I’d never asked.”
_1337038921.jpg)
Loading...
Comments