Organic Gardening Magazine

Your complete guide to gardening - naturally!

Twenty questions

As OG celebrates its 20th anniversary, Gaby Bartai talks to founder Basil Caplan about how it all began – and takes a nostalgic look back through the archives.

Twenty is a good age for a magazine, in an industry where titles come and go overnight and longevity is far less valued than the gloss of the new. It’s an even more impressive age for a ‘niche’ title which, moreover, survived as an independent for 19 of its 20 years.

Organic Gardening was founded in 1988 by Basil Caplan, a journalist for whom the allure of globetrotting had worn thin. In 1979 he’d moved from London to a picture-postcard cottage in the Brendon Hills in Somerset. It came with a substantial garden. “It was the first time I’d been able to indulge myself in gardening,” he says.

So was he an organic gardener from the first? “Not at all. But I happened to pick up a book by Lawrence Hills on organic gardening, and I thought it sounded like good sense. So I started to potter around, and after a year or so I found that it seemed to work, so hey ho, I was organic. But being a journalist there was a nagging thought in the back of my mind – that there ought to be a magazine dedicated to organic gardening.”

“At 3am one morning, a little light went up over my head. The next morning I started scribbling on the back of an envelope… and the rest is history.”

There had been a previous attempt to establish one. In America, J I Rodale’s Organic Gardening magazine had, by the late 60s, a circulation of over a million – more than any inorganic gardening publication. On the strength of that, Rodale decided in 1971 to launch a British edition. HDRA (now Garden Organic) founder Lawrence D Hills was involved with the new magazine and recalls its rise and fall in his autobiography. He makes the point – still valid today – that financing an organic publication is hard. Organic gardeners are not noted consumers – ‘there is no advertising revenue in not using chemical fertilizers and poison sprays.’ In Britain, Rodale was ahead of his time, and the UK edition folded after two years.

Fifteen years later, the time seemed ripe for another attempt. Basil Caplan was lying awake one night at 3am, “and a little light went up over my head. The next morning I started scribbling on the back of an envelope… and the rest is history.”

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