Out now: The Plant #3

For its new third issue, The Plant Journal has dropped the word ‘Journal’ from its name. The Plant is a better name; it helps the magazine stand apart from Wilder Quarterly and while ‘Journal’ was once a useful statement of a magazines’ desire to be different, the word is becoming a cliché of indie publishing.

Like the first two issues the design owes a fair bit to Apartamento in its approach to image and text. The pages are larger than that magazine and the typography a little less sophisticated, but they share some DNA. This might be a problem if the content wasn’t up to scratch, but thankfully the issue is full of great material.

With a more garden-centric focus than Wilder, as its name suggests, The Plant offers a 16-page section on different paper stock about Camelias (above) as well as more esoteric items such as a series of abstract images representing fruit and vegetable flavour combinations (shot by Scheltens and Abbenes). The issue opens with a lengthy photo-essay from the Costa Brava by Coke Bartina (starting with the cover image, top). Pieces follow on city gardening, a French florist, growing Indigo and my favourite, a return to the late filmmaker Derek Jarman’s Dungeness garden.

It’s a well-paced set of stories related to gardening, ideal for gardeners but with enough beyond gardening to appeal more broadly.