GARDENING : Indulging in Earthly Delights : Magazine for Boomers With Budding Desires
Call it “The Big Till,” a magazine for baby boomers who at this stage in life are going, if not totally to seed, then to bulbs and compost and all those other earthly delights.
Actually, the stylish new magazine is called Garden Design, and it seeks to put a uniquely boomer spin on the subject of gardening. If that’s reminiscent of what Metropolitan Home did with interior design, there’s a reason: Dorothy Kalins, who left Met Home last year when it was sold, now heads the new gardening bimonthly.
“I know with myself, and I see it with my friends as well, I don’t much care what my living room looks like anymore. I know I’m never going to get it right,” Kalins says. “But the garden--there’s a sense of satisfaction that you get there that is unduplicated.”
Demographically, Garden Design seems to be in the right place at the right time. The gardening bug tends to bite when people are somewhere in the vicinity of 40, industry analysts say, and the nation’s more than 70 million baby boomers currently are between 30 and 50 years old.
“This group’s enthusiasm for the newly discovered outdoors is not matched by their expertise,” says Kalins, who gives her age as “the leading edge of the baby boom.”
“Baby boomers always need magazines of their own. They have a particular language and lifestyle and value system that they carry around with them. They’re the best magazine audience in the world--they’re the last generation raised on reading, whether it’s books or magazines.”
Indeed, the team behind Garden Design has a history of speaking to baby boomers. In addition to Kalins, who joined Met Home in 1981 when it was still Apartment Life, the principals include executives who have such publications as Rolling Stone, People and Martha Stewart Living in their credits.
Garden Design uses elegant design, lush photography, a trendy approach and articles that are information-dense yet easily digested to attract their target generation. “You have to be smitten with it, but it has to have so many layers to make you come back,” she says.
While the premier issue--which sells for $5 on the newsstand and $4 by subscription--has attracted upscale advertising such as Jaguar and Chivas Regal, some question whether the magazine is too narrowly focused on higher-end consumers.
“It’s not as if all baby boomers are affluent yuppies,” says Bruce Butterfield, research director of the National Gardening Assn., a nonprofit organization based in Vermont that also publishes its own magazine, National Gardening. “In my view, it’s the same as all those people who subscribe to Architectural Digest but don’t live in million-dollar mansions. But it looks good on the coffee table.”
Garden Design has what Butterfield calls the “dream machine” appeal of other upscale magazines devoted to, say, exotic travel or gourmet cooking. Meaning you may not travel or cook as lavishly as those portrayed on the magazines’ pages, but you enjoy reading about or imagining such a lifestyle.
