It’s practically a given that during any editorial meeting, several G&G staffers will go off on a gardening tangent. You might find us talking about the favored milkweed species for monarchs, bragging about an unreal cucumber harvest, swapping tips on how to get the best blooms from Peggy Martin roses, or debating our favorite seed catalogues. (It’s John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds for me.) No matter the particular subject, you can bet that senior editor CJ Lotz Diego is in the mix. Lotz Diego covers travel and gardens in our pages, including penning this issue’s feature on creating a night-blooming oasis. She met her future husband, Max, at a sale for planters and vases. It just so happened he worked at a local event company, in charge of florals. No surprise, then, that their first date was in CJ’s own garden, where Max helped her build planter stands to give the effect of more height, and she “pretended to be cool around power tools.”
These days the couple’s shared garden is more gorgeous than ever. It’s loaded with crinum lilies, ferns, hellebores, and more. And a thriving Peggy Martin rose vine climbs up the railing of their front porch steps. “Every April she goes crazy,” Lotz Diego says fondly of the variety she planted in 2020.
So when it was time to photograph a cover for this issue, we called on the two of them to join photo director Maggie Kennedy and photographer Whitney Ott in the studio. That magic can be seen in the shot of hellebore buds and blooms on the cover of your issue if you’re a subscriber. If you happened to pick up G&G at the newsstand, your cover image comes from a stunning mountain Eden in Western North Carolina, photographed by Will Crooks.
It’s been an unusually cold (and snowy!) winter across much of the South, but as this issue was heading to press, a warm front was ushering in a burst of sunshine across the region. The gardeners on staff got the itch to get in the dirt, as I’m sure many of you did. If so, I know you’ll love this issue. Happy spring.
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David DiBenedetto is the senior vice president and editor in chief of Garden & Gun. He is the author of On the Run: An Angler’s Journey Down the Striper Coast and the cohost of The Wild South podcast. A native of Savannah, DiBenedetto now resides in Charleston, South Carolina, with his wife, Jenny, their two children, and their Labrador retriever, Story. Follow @davedibenedetto on Instagram.
