Wednesday 26 March 2014

my name in print

There is a copy of one of the regional glossy magazines on the kitchen table.  We don't generally buy it, being rather mean about paying for print media when there is so much for free on the internet, but this one has my name in it, above an article about a Yellow Book garden.  I have already submitted my copy for next month, and dates to visit the next two gardens are in my diary.  I am being paid to do this, and have become, on an epically small scale, a horticultural journalist.

The way I got the gig was that my former employer advertises with the media group, and it so happened that I'd written a four hundred word blurb about their snowdrops for inclusion in the magazine.  That is the deal, sometimes, with regional magazines: if you pay to advertise, you may get space for some more cover if you supply your own copy.  My employer did not like writing, whereas I do.  So I emailed the magazine, saying that I was the person who wrote the snowdrop article, and was there any chance of doing some more garden writing for them on a freelance basis? It turned out that the editor felt their gardening cover was a bit thin, and didn't have anyone reliable to do it.  I promised that she would find me utterly reliable, and she decided to take the chance.

The magazine supplied the names and addresses of the gardens to write about, so all I had to do was fix a date with the owners to see the garden and ask them about it, then write it up in six hundred words.  Six hundred words is really not very many, less than two sides of A4 at spacing of one and a half lines.  The snowdrop piece was four hundred, and I ran that off in forty minutes.  I was quite familiar with the snowdrops, and the garden, so it was pretty straightforward, but it had a couple of phrases I was pleased with.  My fee for this unacknowledged feat of journalism, based on my hourly rate for writing (which was better than my hourly rate as a plant centre assistant), came to the princely sum of eight pounds.

The deadline for submitting the copy on my first garden was the end of February, so I fixed the meeting for the twenty-first.  A week seemed to me an age to write only six hundred words, and I thought it would be easier to work out what was in the garden and what it was going to look like by visiting season if I visited later rather than earlier, to give the plants more time to get going.  The chosen time was two, since I thought that if there were a frost, the owner would not want a visitor's feet stamping over their frozen grass.  Then I had fits of anxiety for the whole of the four weeks until the visit.  Suppose I were ill again, or the garden owner were ill, or the garden was flooded?  I had visions of the A14 being locked solid on the day, and left the house with hours to spare, so that I could not possibly be late to the meeting, and spent some time looking at Hedingham Church, some time sitting in the car, and a while drinking tea in a strange cafe attached to an alpaca farm.

The owners were very pleased that their garden was going to be in the magazine, and the owner was obviously used to giving guided walks, as he kept up a good line of patter, and I got more material than would ever have fitted in six hundred words, without having to ask many questions.  I did have a check list of points I wanted to cover, or at least establish were not relevant, to make sure I didn't get home and realise there was some fairly basic key fact that had escaped me.

Always try and learn from your experiences.  I made sure my next visit was timed with two weeks to go before the deadline, so that if anything went wrong there would be time to retrieve the situation, either by rescheduling that visit or by the editor finding another garden.  I have also learned not to drink very much tea with my breakfast on garden visiting days, and to keep a weather eye out for available lavatories.  It would not create a professional impression to arrive on a stranger's doorstep to see their garden, and immediately have to ask if you could possibly use their loo first.

Writing a six hundred word article on a garden is just like writing a presentation.  Introduce the garden, where it is, what style of garden, how long the owners have been there.  Something about the plants, something about the soil, the hard landscaping if it's worth mentioning, a little about pests and problems, artworks or propagation if applicable, a summary at the end.  Get a few quotes, and be prepared to lead your witness on their favourite plants and what other local gardens they like, if your editor has asked you for these items.  I asked my first owner what his favourite plants were, and he smiled and said he liked all plants.  The second owner seemed slightly nervous in case I was going to criticise his garden in print, but I wasn't.  Apart from the fact that it was a very good garden, my job is not to pick faults, but to make it sound as nice as I can, so that readers of the magazine will go and visit it, or go and visit some other garden, or at least experience a warm glow as they congratulate themselves on living in such an attractive part of the world.

I have found my best time to do the write-up is straight after breakfast the following day.  I tried after getting back, and found I was too tired to finish it.  When I picked it up again, the joins showed, and it took longer that if I'd completed it in one hit.  Then I sit on it for a day, and re-read it cold to check again for typos, and any errors or boobs that I missed first time round.  In the second piece, I found I'd left the owner's name out of the first paragraph.

I have been building up to this for a long time.  If gardening and visiting gardens since childhood, and notching up over twenty-five Chelsea visits, and spending a decade selling plants to people, and a horticultural degree, and practising writing the blog daily for over three years whether I feel like writing or not, doesn't equip me to become a garden writer, then nothing will.   I renewed my car insurance this morning, so had to tell them that my details had changed since I was no longer employed as a retail assistant.  When they asked what I did instead said I was now a horticultural journalist, so it's official.  All I have to do is to sell my services to some more publications, and hope that my existing editor wants to carry on after the current Yellow Book season.

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