"Lovers of the gardening lifestyle can now enjoy a marvelous new digital publication designed just for them. GIE Media has launched its first-ever consumer magazine, A Garden Life, as a free app for iPad and Android tablet platforms. The premiere issue is available for download now on iTunes/Apple Store or get it on the Android Market.
Each issue of A Garden Life
will explore and celebrate the concept of "life as a garden." GIE Media
Chairman, Richard Foster, describes the magazine's mission: "To create a
community of consumers with shared values and interests in lifestyle
subject areas such as healthy living, that includes growing and
preparing clean food, contributing to community, exploring travel and
adventure, art and literature, as well as having a passion for diverse
aspects of nature and gardening." GIE will publish six issues of A
Garden Life in 2012 (March, May, June, July/August, September/October,
November/December).
A Garden Life will also
utilize the latest social media tools to stimulate active reader
engagement with its editors and contributors, as well as with one
another, be it across town or around the world. "Tablet mobile
technology - and the social media it facilitates - can stimulate sharing
of ideas through direct one-to-one connections by email and messaging,
and simple tools for sharing imagery, audio and video," says Foster.
A Garden Life has a companion website (www.agardenlife.com)
that will offer the magazine app content to consumers who do not yet
use tablet technology. The website will include deep databases of
horticultural products such as perennials, annuals, succulents, grasses,
trees, ornamentals and lawn and garden hard-goods items. GIE will also
offer consumer readers a regular electronic newsletter of garden center
product insights at no charge."
This is not my idea of a desirable gardening publication. It's intended,
as they say, for the 'lovers of the gardening lifestyle' and the
'consumer readers' out there. Everything you love is now a commodity.
