About GARTEN+HAUS

GARTEN+HAUS

GARTEN+HAUS is an Austrian garden magazine published jointly by the Österreichische Gartenbau-Gesellschaft (ÖGG), the Austrian Horticultural Society, and the Österreichischer Agrarverlag, the Vienna agricultural publishing house. It is described as Austria's largest garden magazine and the market leader in its field, and the ÖGG calls it the country's only specialist garden magazine. The society behind it has published a garden magazine since 1868; the joint publication under the name Garten + Haus — written in the magazine's own branding as GARTEN+HAUS — dates from 2002. The publisher's shop marks ninety years of GARTEN+HAUS with its 2026 issues, and current issues run to about one hundred pages, covering ornamental and kitchen gardening, garden design, nature in the garden and seasonal practical advice for Austrian gardeners.

A garden magazine since 1868

The lineage of GARTEN+HAUS begins in 1868, when the Österreichische Gartenbau-Gesellschaft began publishing a garden periodical. The society itself, founded in 1837, is one of Austria's oldest horticultural institutions, a non-party, independent, non-denominational and non-profit organisation dedicated to promoting garden culture in Austria. Its periodical accompanied the society's other pioneering work of those years, which included the opening in 1868 of the first lower horticultural school, a school that existed until 1951, and later the higher horticultural school founded in 1895 at Eisgrub (Lednice) and moved to Vienna in 1923 before being incorporated into the wine and fruit school at Klosterneuburg in 1925.

Through its long history the society's journal appeared under changing titles of the era — the Wiener Illustrirte Garten-Zeitung, organ of the imperial-royal horticultural society in Vienna, published from 1879 to 1905, is one documented predecessor form in that tradition. A title history of that depth means GARTEN+HAUS, for all its modern appearance, is the current form of one of the oldest garden periodicals in the German-speaking world.

Since 2002: ÖGG and Agrarverlag together

Since 2002 the magazine has been published jointly under the name Garten + Haus by the Österreichische Gartenbau-Gesellschaft and the Österreichischer Agrarverlag. The partnership joins the society's horticultural authority — its specialist library, its expert and regional groups, its courses and its advisory services — with the Agrarverlag's professional magazine production and distribution. The Agrarverlag, founded in 1928 and based in Vienna, publishes dozens of agricultural, forestry, garden and consumer titles and has been owned since December 2023 by the Raiffeisen-Holding Niederösterreich-Wien.

Ninety years of the modern magazine are being marked in 2026: the publisher's shop describes the issue 6/2026 as celebrating 90 years of GARTEN+HAUS with a retrospective and a major competition, which dates the counted life of the title in its modern line to the 1930s. That anniversary reckoning and the society's 1868 starting point describe different things — the age of the present magazine line and the age of the society's garden publishing — and both are reported here as their sources state them.

Austria's largest garden magazine

GARTEN+HAUS is described in reference sources as Austria's largest garden magazine and the market leader, and by the ÖGG itself as the only Austrian specialist garden magazine, issued jointly with the Agrarverlag. Those descriptions are quoted as the sources give them: no ÖAK audited circulation figure for the magazine is published in the sources used for this profile, and no number is invented here. Its scale is instead visible in its physical form and programme: current single issues offered in the publisher's shop run to one hundred pages at a single-issue price of 7.40 euros, a substantial monthly-class garden magazine by any European standard.

Market leadership in a country of Austria's gardening intensity — with its allotment tradition, its strong culture of private ornamental and vegetable gardens and its professional horticulture — gives the magazine a particular role: for many Austrian amateur gardeners it is the default printed authority, and for the trade it is a principal advertising and information channel.

What an issue contains

The publisher's shop listing for issue 6/2026 gives a verified cross-section of the magazine's current contents. Its themes include rambler and climbing roses, vertical gardening on the balcony, amphibians in the garden pond, keeping chickens, quails and honeybees, vegetables that thrive in semi-shade, defeating ground elder permanently, the best strawberry varieties, plant charcoal as the new black gold, Mediterranean style with native plants, garden crime stories around the insect hotel, night darkness and light pollution in the garden, sail shades as sun protection, and a standing question-and-answer feature in which Karl Ploberger, one of Austria's best-known garden presenters, answers readers' garden questions. Another recent issue's listing adds preserving with a twist, Asian herbs and vegetables from one's own garden and growing sweetcorn.

The mixture is characteristic: practical how-to guidance for the season, plant portraits and variety advice, garden visits and design ideas, nature and wildlife in the garden, harvesting and preserving from the kitchen garden, and expert answers to readers' problems. It is a magazine for people who garden themselves, edited to the Austrian climate and calendar.

The society behind the magazine

The Österreichische Gartenbau-Gesellschaft promotes garden culture in Austria continuously since 1837, passing on specialist knowledge about garden, plants and nature to its members and to all interested people. It maintains what it describes as Austria's unique specialist horticultural library, runs expert and regional groups, conferences, workshops, lectures, excursions, exhibitions and specialist advice, sets annual thematic priorities, and issues the GrünCard membership card with discounts. In 2005 the society moved to the former horticultural school in Vienna-Kagran, the district that is also home to Austria's horticultural museum and its vocational school for gardening and floristry.

GARTEN+HAUS is the society's voice in print. Members and non-members alike are offered courses and advice by the society, and the magazine carries that educational mission to a far larger audience than any course room could hold, in a direct line from the society's nineteenth-century combination of a journal, a school and a library.

The publisher's shop and single issues

GARTEN+HAUS is sold by subscription and as single issues through the publisher's online shop at garten-haus.at, where recent issues are listed with their full contents at 7.40 euros including tax plus shipping, with about one hundred pages per issue. The shop's listings are the most practical public source on the magazine's current programme: they show the seasonal rhythm of its themes, from spring planting to autumn preserving, and document the ninety-year anniversary presentation of the 2026 volume.

The magazine's website, garten-haus.at, is its public address for subscriptions, single issues and the society-linked programme around the title. Current frequency and subscription prices should be taken from that source, since they are set by the publisher and can change; this profile does not fix a per-year issue count that its sources do not state consistently.

Gardening authority: Ploberger and the experts

A named expert feature of the current magazine is the question column in which Karl Ploberger answers readers' garden questions — seven times garden pleasure, in the shop listing's description of one issue. Ploberger is known to Austrian audiences as a television and radio gardener, and his presence connects the printed magazine to the wider Austrian garden-media world of broadcasts, books and garden shows. Around such named features, the magazine draws on the ÖGG's expert groups for specialist material — a new society expert group on land cultivation as a social engine, noted in a recent issue's contents, shows the society feeding its own working life directly into the magazine's pages.

That expert structure is the practical meaning of the joint publication model: the society supplies authority and specialists, the publishing house supplies editors, production and reach.

GARTEN+HAUS among Agrarverlag titles

Within the Österreichischer Agrarverlag's portfolio, GARTEN+HAUS is the consumer garden title alongside professional horticultural publications such as Gärtner+Florist. Its distribution also connects it to the publisher's culinary family: the Agrarverlag's media material records Zeit für Genuss magazine being distributed partly as a supplement in GARTEN+HAUS, among other titles of the house — a sign of how the publisher uses its established garden readership to carry its food magazine to households interested in growing and cooking. For advertisers, the magazine offers the Austrian gardening household in concentrated form; for readers, the connection is natural, since kitchen gardeners are cooks by harvest time.

The magazine should not be confused with German garden titles of similar name. GARTEN+HAUS is the Austrian title of the ÖGG and Agrarverlag, edited for Austrian conditions, Austrian varieties and Austrian garden law and custom.

Reading the record carefully

GARTEN+HAUS's public record mixes three different ages, and care is needed in citing them: the ÖGG has published a garden magazine since 1868; the joint ÖGG–Agrarverlag publication under the Garten + Haus name dates from 2002; and the publisher counts ninety years of GARTEN+HAUS in 2026 for the modern title line. All three statements come from the magazine's own institutional sources and are compatible once it is understood that they measure the society's publishing tradition, the present partnership and the modern magazine respectively. This profile states each with its own basis rather than merging them into a single founding year.

Similarly, the claim to be Austria's largest garden magazine comes from reference descriptions of the title and the society's claim to publish the country's only specialist garden magazine; both are reported as attributed claims, not as audited measurements, because no circulation audit for the title is reproduced in the sources used.

Current status

GARTEN+HAUS remains in publication as the joint magazine of the Österreichische Gartenbau-Gesellschaft and the Österreichischer Agrarverlag, sold through garten-haus.at in issues of about one hundred pages and marking its ninety-year anniversary across its 2026 volume. Behind its modern covers stands the longest publishing tradition of any title in this batch: a horticultural society that has put a garden magazine into Austrian hands since 1868, through empire, republics and the digital age. For Austrian gardeners, it continues to do the job that tradition implies — telling them, season by season, what to sow, plant, prune, harvest and preserve, and connecting their private plots to a national community of garden culture nearly two centuries old.