About
About The Garden Magic Hub
Where the horticulture comes from, where the pictures come from, and what to do when something here is wrong.
What this is
The Garden Magic Hub is a reference site for home gardeners in the United States. It covers houseplants, outdoor plants and flowers, growing food, pests and plant diseases, soil and tools, landscaping, and gardening for wildlife.
Most of what is published here answers a specific question rather than surveying a subject — why a monstera is yellowing, when to plant garlic in your zone, whether the white dust on a squash leaf is the disease you think it is. That is deliberate. Gardening questions arrive urgently and specifically, and a general care guide is rarely the thing that answers them.
How the horticulture is sourced
Gardening advice online is full of confidently repeated folklore, and a great deal of it is wrong. The working rule here is that a claim about how a plant behaves has to trace back to a published horticultural source, and the source is named in the article where the claim is made.
In practice that means university cooperative extension services — Clemson HGIC, Iowa State, University of Maryland, Penn State, Illinois, Minnesota, UC IPM and their counterparts — because extension publications are written for home gardeners, revised as the science moves, and free to read. Botanical and taxonomic detail is checked against the USDA PLANTS Database, which is also what the native and introduced status shown on some articles refers to.
Two habits follow from that rule and are worth stating plainly. Where the sources disagree, the article says they disagree rather than picking the tidier answer. Where there is no good source for something gardeners commonly ask, the article says that too, instead of filling the gap with something plausible.
Every article also states the conditions its advice depends on — hardiness zone, light, water, the species in question — in the tag beneath the headline. You should never have to read three paragraphs to find out whether a piece of advice applies to your garden.
Where the images come from
Photographs are used under open licences — predominantly Creative Commons images from Wikimedia Commons — and each one credits its photographer and names its licence beneath the image. Every photograph is checked against the plant it claims to show before it is published, because mislabelled plant photos are common even on reputable sources, and a picture of the wrong species is worse than no picture at all.
Corrections
This site will not be a permanent exception to the folklore problem described above. If something here is inaccurate, out of date, or misleading for a particular climate, it should be fixed rather than quietly left up.
Substantive corrections are noted at the foot of the article, with the date they were made. A public address for reporting them is not yet published.
How this site makes money
It does not. The Garden Magic Hub currently carries no advertising, no affiliate links, and no sponsored or gifted products. Nothing on this site earns a commission if you buy it, and no product is recommended here because someone paid for the placement.
If that changes, it will be disclosed here and on the articles it affects, before it earns anything.