A garden magazine from the country's largest garden tour...

I'm so excited. My two great passions are combining to produce a real live gardening magazine to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Garden Walk Buffalo – gardening and design!

The Garden Walk Buffalo board has sanctioned a commemorative 20th anniversary annual. It will be a (roughly) 60-page, glossy, over-sized, magazine-type publication. Technically, it is not a magazine because there are no further issues planned. It's more of a commemorative annual. Though it's not an annual project either.

I'm excited because the articles/topics we'll be covering – as well as for the contributing writers preparing those articles. The writers are well-known area garden writers, like Sally Cunningham, Elizabeth Licata, Connie Oswald Stofko, Rochester's Jane Millimen and more. Even though they're local, they all have national garden publications in their writing portfolios. The lead feature article will be written by a significant writer in the gardening realm, TBA.


I'm also excited because of the great content we've got in store - Buffalo-style gardening, how to get the most out of a garden tour, small-space gardening tips from Buffalo gardens, water features from the Walk, grassless front yards, Buffalo's great hellstrips (the area between sidewalk and road), gardening in Buffalo's climate and urban spaces, garden ideas found on the Walk, Is your garden ready for a garden tour?, the story of Garden Walk Buffalo, Sixteenth Street's turnaround, the tourism significance of such a large garden tour,  a popular Buffalo plant list, 10 great area garden destinations, and much, much more.

In addition to getting to choose topics and solicit writers, I've been able to design the "annual." I'm an art director and virtually everything I create has had either a creative director or client directing the final product. Here I had no "boss" and am able to design with reckless abandon. There is one "boss" – and that is the audience for the magazine. So making sure the content is of interest, relevant, and meaningful to them is the only consideration I will kowtow to. To work with the great photos from the Walk's gardens shot by Don Zinteck over the years, as well as photos I've taken, I've been like a kid in a candy store.

Shown here are just some of the article lead pages to tease you. The publication is expected to be available at Plantasia this year (end of March at the Erie County Fairgrounds Buildings).

We're looking at a potential $10.00 (or more) retail price. We're currently looking at distribution possibilities to help us determine how many to get printed.
This will be a fundraising opportunity for the Walk. Ever since we published the Garden Walk Book way back in 2006, visitors have asked relentlessly about when we'd be printing another book – or assuming we printed a book every year. We're crazy, but we're not nuts - that's a lot of work!

We're about 75% done with articles, page layouts and copy editing. Yes - we have a copy editor! I'm VERY excited about that.

There's plenty more to do. We're not soliciting ads per se, but if anyone would like to advertise in the magazine, we can work that out. It has to be ready to go to a printer in about a month, so if you're interested, let us know now so we can reserves a space. Garden Walk Buffalo sponsors of $1,000 or more will get a free ad – provided they get the ad artwork to me by February 15, 2014. Email me here if you're interested in advertising in the annual.

This commemorative annual should satisfy the appetites of the Garden Walk Buffalo fans – until we can maybe do a book for our 25th anniversary!