By Aprille Phooles, (aka Karen England) for Let’s Talk Plants! April 2024.
Unveiling Our New Name in April – The San Diego Herbicultural Society
I became Let’s Talk Plants! newsletter editor in August of 2019, and immediately saw that the need for new newsletter content was going to be an ongoing concern as regular columnists were already coming and going from my day one.
To this day, I am always looking for columnists, maybe I’ve even asked you to contribute? Thankfully, many of you have answered, “Yes!”
If I haven’t asked you yet, well, consider yourself asked!
There are contributor opportunities for SD Hort members as a guest (if you have just one column and one column only in you, then your contribution would be as a guest), biyearly or two columns a year, quarterly or four columns a year, bimonthly or six columns a year and monthly or twelve columns a year. You and a friend can co-author a column if you prefer, either by trading off months with each other or by sharing a byline each time you write. Tell me what you’d like to write about and how often and we’ll go from there. Email me at info@sdhort.org with “Newsletter” in the subject line and I’ll get right back to you.
In the meanwhile, I have supplemented the contributor list since 2019 by writing articles myself under a variety of nom de plumes as well as my own good name. (I learned this trick from the original editor of Victoria magazine, Nancy Lindemeyer, who was so hard up for contributors at the beginning in 1987 that she authored articles under the name of Jenny Walton to make the contributor list look longer. If Nancy could do it . . .)
Honestly, it’s hard for me to do this since my horticultural expertise is in an obscure arena, herbs, and the articles needed for our newsletter are about all of horticulture, not just my personal favorite corner of it. If I were going to pad the articles and contributor list, then I needed to be canny about it and write about what I know and like in such a way that it would not turn us into the San Diego Herbicultural Society by accident. So far, I think I’m doing okay keeping my fervent herbology to a minimum, although some of you may argue the point. Why am I telling you this? The April Fool’s Day column is by far my favorite way to pad this newsletter and I need no real horticultural knowledge to do it. And this one may just be my favorite so far!
Haven’t read any of Karen’s previous April Fool’s articles? Here they all are!
Karen England is the San Diego Horticultural (and Herbicultural) Society president. No foolin'.