Our Roots
Back in 1971, Lyman Wood founded Gardens for All, the precursor of today's National Gardening Association. In the decades since its foundation, NGA has grown and evolved with the times, and has been led by a variety of different people. During the 1980s and 1990s we published the National Gardening Magazine, which had a circulation of over 250,000 subscribers and was known for cutting edge, high quality gardening information and design innovations. As the internet became available to homeowners around the country, our attention turned to the web, and today we dedicate ourselves to promoting gardening through our numerous books and by providing premier educational gardening resources online.

Our Mission
NGA promotes gardening by helping home gardeners succeed, growing in health, knowledge, environmental awareness, and enthusiasm. In the numerous ways the National Gardening Association reaches gardeners, we help make home and community gardens greener and more productive. From vegetables, herbs, fruits, trees, lawns, flowers, and houseplants, we provide people with the information they need to get started in the world of gardening and grow and maintain thriving, sustainable, and environmentally responsible food gardens and landscapes.
NGA has worked with many authors and publishers to create numerous practical and inspirational gardening books.

Grants and Awards
Over the past forty years, NGA's support of youth gardening programs has allowed us to develop significant expertise and a rich base of knowledge so that we can provide the resources and information needed to implement successful, self-sustaining garden programs. This mission continues through KidsGardening.org. Through the Garden in Every School Initiative™ we have provided funding and support to over 10,000 youth garden programs across the United States and internationally, worth approximately $4 million and directly reaching an estimated 2 million youngsters. Nearly 60% of our school grant winners have been from low-income communities, many in districts where almost all of the students receive federal assistance. NGA's garden programs have contributed to successful environmental education, health, and academic studies implemented in wide variety of learning environments. Learn more about KidsGardening.org's grants and awards programs.

Educational Resources
NGA provides extensive educational materials and a host of free resources on our website. Our learning library contains detailed gardening guides covering basic plant care, food gardening, weeds and pests, educational curricula that is useful for gardeners of all ages, and a vast treasury of articles covering every aspect of gardening.

Our plants database is one of the most complete databases of plants in existence. Collaboratively developed by thousands of NGA members, it is rich with information, comments, photos, growers performance reports, and much more. Our plants database is at the core of our plant-specific educational resources. (More about our database below.)

Garden.org
On the Garden.org website, gardeners can access a vast and rich resource of articles, information, community features, gardening research, software tools, and all manner of gardening content to find how to grow all kinds of plants, identify and control pests and diseases, or figure out what kind of weeds are sprouting in the garden.

At the center of the site is our large and complete plant database, containing over 400,000 photos of more than 700,000 plants. This interactive feature enables NGA community members to share photos and information about the plants they are interested in, and facilitates discussion centered around those contributions. Detailed information, such as parentage, bloom color, hardiness, etc., is present for most plants in the database, and a powerful search engine lets visitors find plants by querying for these specific characteristics.

Daily ideas and expert articles, and an audio podcast are posted to the site, and a weekly email newsletter containing all the best content from the previous week, along with the best photos posted to the database, and much more, is sent out to the members every weekend.

The site also features numerous web tools for gardeners, including a useful gardening planting calendar, reviews of gardening companies, and dozens of highly active forums are available for gardening inspirations and conversation.

Online membership to the NGA is free and available to all. Join today!