Looking Ahead, Looking Back: 5 Years of Gardenista

Happy New Year from Gardenista! We’ve celebrated our fifth birthday and are thrilled to be the Internet’s best-read daily gardening and landscape design magazine.

With 17 new posts published each week, you may have missed a few since 2012. Here are some milestones, trends, favorite gardens—and highlights from our book, Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces:

2012

• Gardenista launches on May 22 with a first post that describes our view of The Cultivated Life.
• Time magazine puts us on its list of The Year’s 25 Best Blogs, and reviewer Doug Aarnoth says, “It’s about much more than just gardens and gardening; plant Gardenista in your bookmarks.”

• Good friends from around the world share their gardens with our readers, including architect Ben Pentreath’s Misty Dorset Garden to Chez Panisse chef Samantha Greenwood’s Roses Gone Wild in Berkeley.
• The year’s most popular Steal This Look post features Michelle Obama’s White House Garden (and her navy sneakers).

2013

• The fiddle leaf fig houseplant craze takes off on Pinterest (and in Gardenista editor in chief Michelle Slatalla’s house, as chronicled in The Fig and I.)
• We announce our first-ever Considered Design Awards contest. Readers vote to give the prizes to designers in British Columbia, Dublin, Los Angeles, Tucson, and Brooklyn.
• The year’s top Expert Advice post is 10 tips for floral arrangements with native plants, from Manhattan-based florist Emily Thompson (whose past clients include the White House in the Obama administration).

• • Gardenista contributor Marie Viljoen publishes her first cookbook, A Delicious Life, with recipes inspired by her 66-square-foot Brooklyn roof garden. (When she moves to Harlem in 2014, our readers get a tour of her new, four-times-bigger terrace garden.)
  • On far-flung sleuthing missions to find gardens, Michelle visits The Best Secret Garden in Barcelona, Alexa explores A Ceramist’s Garden and Atelier in Paris and Meredith decamps to Italy for three weeks, where she can be found “sipping Aperol and eating cured olives in a friend’s terrace garden.”

2014

• With the forced bulb craze in full swing, Michelle passes up Bottle-Fed Paperwhites and instead pots up grape hyacinths “to see just how hard it would be to force muscari to bloom indoors.”
• We launch our popular Hardscaping 101 series, with posts about exterior design elements from Gabion Walls to Garage Flooring. (Since then, we’ve published 92 more, including readers’ favorites Decomposed Granite and Pea Gravel.)

• Our new Garden Ideas to Steal from around the world posts become our most popular series, with insider tips from Canada to Crete (as well as garden ideas to steal from Provence, Ireland, Japan, India, and the Cotswolds).

• Editor Cheryl Locke joins our team and investigates Boxwood: 8 Ways to Use Evergreens to Create Curb Appeal (including the “shaggy dog look” as shown above and and the 1+1 technique).

2015

• Working on our first book, we fly around the world to photograph three dozen gardens—visiting London-based designer Rose Uniacke at Home Among the Orchids, NY-based designer Julie Farris’s Rooftop Meadow in Brooklyn, and The Cape Cod Garden of Designer John Derian, Historic Sea Captain’s House Included.

• Trend spotting: Our predictions of the top landscape design ideas in 2015 include a Black Palette, Horizontal Slat Fences, and Fire Pits.

2016

• • Our book, Gardenista: The Definitive Guide to Stylish Outdoor Spaces, is published.
  • The Evening Standard names Gardenista to its list of best gardening books of 2016, calling it “a complete treasure trove of tips and inspiration from other gardeners.”

• Gardenista editor in chief Michelle Slatalla’s Mill Valley, California garden is featured in The New York Times.
• With a $200 budget (we run a tight ship), Alexa shops the NYC Flower District to make five DIY floral arrangements for our book launch party.
• Contributor Marie Viljoen creates two foraged cocktails to kick off the festivities at our first NYC Remodelista Market.

2017

• • We launch our new Garden Design 101 plant guides to Succulents & Cacti, Edibles, Trees, Bulbs & Tubers, Shrubs, Tropical Plants, Houseplants, Perennials, Annuals, Vines & Climbers, and Grasses.
  • Gardenista contributor Kendra Wilson publishes her book, The Problem with My Garden, nearly five years to the day after writing her first post for us. The book (like Kendra’s nearly 350 Gardenista posts) is “portable, accessible, and jolly,” writes House & Garden.

• • • Named one of The New York Times’ Innovative Floral Designers to Know, our contributor Sophia Moreno-Bunge invites us to her LA apartment to learn 10 Ideas to Bring Nature Home.
    • Readers’ favorite garden visits of the year include Architect Kelly Haegglund at Home in Mill Valley, CA, Annie Guilfoyle’s Kitchen Garden in Sussex, Charlotte Molesworth’s Topiary Garden, and Claus Dalby in Denmark.
    • Reviewing our book in June, The World of Interiors congratulates our Remodelista and Gardenista team for becoming a “soaraway success” and notes: “With its emphasis on outdoor living the book’s time is right.”
    • Most popular post of the year: 10 Things Your Landscape Architect Wishes You Knew (But Is Too Polite to Tell You).
    • Top post of all time? Garden Tech advice: Apps to ID Plants and Leaves (originally published in September, 2012).

(N.B.: What’s ahead for gardeners in 2018? Check back tomorrow to see our latest list of Top Design Trends for the upcoming year.)