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From start to finish, Yoest is involved with each garden for about three years. "I scout one year. If selected, they shoot the next year, and it's published the third year."

Familiar gardens

In addition to the Little Herb House, she is coordinating stories on several Raleigh gardens that will appear in Nature's Garden magazine. For Better Homes & Gardens, she is styling Jere Stevens' garden in Cary -- the very same storybook garden we visited in last month's Grapevine.

Editors rarely request singular "garden features," Yoest says. It costs money and time to visit gardens, and she isn't paid unless her submissions are chosen. Yoest finds her leads via word of mouth, attending garden tours, talking to designers and architects, other gardeners, nurseries and garden centers. Occasionally, she reads about them in The Grapevine.

Or it's the other way around -- many of the gardens I write about are chosen because Yoest put them on a tour or recommended them as local treasures.

Our chief criterion is that we want to see a fully realized garden design with some maturity. In fact, gardens considered for the Garden Conservancy tours must be of a certain age rather than newly planted ones that haven't weathered several years.

But Yoest says she takes photos of every garden she visits.

"You never know when an art director might need a single photo of, say, interesting fencing, a special nook, seasonal color or a dramatic container garden." When that happens, she combs through her file of thousands of photos and submits her prime examples.

So next time you fantasize about seeing your fantastic garden in a national magazine, go for it. I'll hear about it long before your story is published, and maybe it will make the local paper in the meantime.

I'm proud to say that in 2000 I was the first to recognize the potential in the Little Herb House. It seems that the likelihood of being plucked from The Grapevine for a shot at the big show is getting stronger with our local champion of Southern gardening, Helen Yoest, on the job.

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