It started, as gardens often do, at the kitchen table. A couple of publishing creatives in the UK — looking after their own patch of earth, learning by trial and error, discovering they cared about the tricky business of growing things — decided there should be a magazine for people like them. Not the glossy, aspirational kind that assumes you already have a walled estate in the Cotswolds, and not the practical kind that reduces gardening to a series of instructions on when to mulch. Something in between. Something with the visual ambition of a fashion magazine and the earthy intelligence of a field guide. In 2016, they made the first issue of rakesprogress and brought it to the world.
The name is a play on Hogarth's A Rake's Progress, and the magazine's progress has been remarkably steady. Seventeen issues deep and approaching its tenth anniversary, rakesprogress describes itself as a progressive gardening magazine and a contemporary look at the world outside. Flick through its almost three hundred pages and you will find gardens, plants, and flowers, but you will also find documentary photography, beekeeping, tools, craft, architecture, sheds, clothes, foraging, art, and — of course — rhubarb. The contributors include fashion, art, and documentary photographers alongside well-known writers from the worlds of journalism and beyond. The result is a publication that a bath-based magazine shop called the one that puts most photography magazines in the shade.
Each issue is built around the seasons and the slow rhythms of plant life, but the editorial interests range far wider than any back garden. A recent volume sent a photographer to Puglia to document the devastating collapse of the region's olive groves. Another traveled to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway's frozen north to meet the keeper of what may be the most important room in the world. There have been features on Ukrainian artists fighting back against war with ikebana, on forensic scientists who solve crimes using their knowledge of pollen, and on Dan Pearson's twenty-year involvement with the Tokachi Millennium Forest in Japan.
The magazine was taken to the RHS Chelsea Flower Show, opened a pop-up on Floral Street in Covent Garden, and has expanded into exhibitions, books, and a creative studio. But the editorial philosophy has never changed from the one articulated in the first issue: rakesprogress is as much a snapshot of the world beyond your computer's window as it is a guide to the business of growing things. Slow is the operative word. And rakesprogress is here, in part, to give you an excuse to pause.
Explore rakesprogress at <a href="https://www.rakesprogressmagazine.com/" target="\_blank">rakesprogressmagazine.com