Garden Retail editor honoured at ‘garden media Oscars’

Matthew Appleby, editor of Haymarket’s Garden Retail magazine, was yesterday honoured as Trade Journalist of the Year in awards billed as the Oscars for UK garden media.

Miranda Kimberley, a reporter for fellow Haymarket title Horticulture Week, was also runner-up in two categories in the Garden Media Guild Awards, held at London’s Royal Lancaster Hotel.

Judges unanimously selected Appleby in the trade journalism category for his “excellent researching skills and also outstanding and persistent journalistic ability”.

Appleby won for his article ‘Garden Retail Power 50’ in Garden Retail, ahead of runners-up Kimberley for ‘Competition gives youth a cutting edge’ in Horticulture Week and Marc Rosenberg for ‘Rethinking animal sales’, also in Garden Retail.

Kimberley was also runner-up in the New Writer Award for her Horticulture Week article ‘A natural storyteller’.

Haymarket’s gardening and horticulture titles consistently produce winners in the Guild’s trade journalism category. In 2007, Horticulture Week writers performed a hat trick by winning the award and taking both runner-up positions.

The 2008 Awards also honoured BBC TV and radio broadcasts alongside gardening journalism in the press, books and online.