Celebrating David Wheeler’s Hortus Magazine

"Thirty-one years after Hortus was founded, the subscription list continues to stay modest.

Subscriptions are about $75 a year, which includes airmail postage."

January 17, 1989

On this day, David Wheeler's gardening journal, Hortus, was started.

Adrian Higgins wrote about David’s founding of Hortus in the Washington Post eight years ago, saying:

A curious throwback to the analog age landed in my mailbox the other day: Hortus, a journal of garden writing.

Almost everything about the quarterly periodical is wonderfully old-fashioned: It produces tactile and aesthetic pleasures once taken for granted ...

Flop in a soft chair, thumb the pages and ponder that Hortus doesn’t exist in some electronic ether ...

David Wheeler started Hortus 31 years ago, and he has a motto that Hortus “is for gardeners who read and readers who garden.”

Thirty-one years after its founding, the subscription list continues to stay modest.

Subscriptions are about $75 a year, which includes airmail postage.

David also writes for newspapers and other periodicals to supplement his income.

He tells his friends that Hortus “pays for the tonic, but not the gin.”

FYI: I just bought a subscription for myself, so Merry Christmas to me.