Privacy Policy

Last updated: 26 August 2026

1. Who we are

The Irish Garden and this website, garden.ie, are published by The Agricultural Trust, a company limited by guarantee registered in Ireland under company number 22941, with its registered office at The Irish Farm Centre, Bluebell, Dublin 12, D12 YXW5.

The Agricultural Trust also publishes the Irish Farmers Journal, The Irish Field and Irish Country Magazine. In this policy, “we”, “us” and “our” mean The Agricultural Trust.

For the purposes of the General Data Protection Regulation (EU) 2016/679 (“GDPR”) and the Data Protection Act 2018, The Agricultural Trust is the data controller for the personal data described in this policy.

This policy explains what personal data we collect through garden.ie and The Irish Garden magazine, why we collect it, what we do with it, and the rights you have over it. It should be read together with our Cookie Policy.

2. How to contact us

If you have a question about this policy, or you want to exercise any of the rights set out in section 10, please contact us using the details above.

3. The personal data we collect

3.1 Information you give us

You give us personal data when you:

• register for a garden.ie account or join the Garden Club — your name, email address, username and password (passwords are stored in encrypted form and are not visible to us), and any profile details you choose to add;
• sign up for our email newsletters — your name and email address, and any topic preferences you select;
• subscribe to The Irish Garden magazine (in print or digital, including through subscribe.garden.ie) — your name, delivery and billing address, email address, phone number, and payment details;
• contact us through our contact form, by email, by phone, by post, or through the live chat on our website — your name, contact details and whatever you choose to tell us;
• enter a competition, poll, survey or reader photo competition — your name and contact details, your entry, and any photographs or other content you submit;
• submit a gardening question, comment, letter or reader contribution — your name, contact details and the content you send us;
• register a garden, event, retailer or business for inclusion in our listings, or enquire about advertising — your name, business name, contact details and the details you ask us to publish.

You do not have to give us any of this information, but if you do not, we may not be able to provide the service you have asked for — for example, we cannot deliver a magazine without a delivery address, or send a newsletter without an email address.

3.2 Information we collect automatically

When you visit garden.ie we automatically collect certain technical information, mainly through cookies and similar technologies:

• your IP address, approximate location (usually at city or country level), device type, operating system and browser;
• the pages you visit, how long you spend on them, what you click on, and the site you came from;
• your cookie and consent preferences.

Non-essential cookies — including analytics and marketing cookies — are only set where you have consented to them through our cookie banner. Full detail on the cookies we use, and how to change your choices at any time, is in our Cookie Policy.

3.3 Information we receive from others

We may receive personal data about you from:

• other Agricultural Trust titles — where you hold a subscription or account with the Irish Farmers Journal, The Irish Field or Irish Country Magazine, we may hold your details on a shared customer database;
• our service providers — for example our subscription bureau, payment processors, or the app stores, who confirm your subscription and payment status to us;
• social media platforms — if you sign in using a social account, or interact with our pages, we receive the profile information that platform shares with us in line with your settings there;
• publicly available sources — for example business contact details for advertising and trade enquiries.

3.4 Children

garden.ie is intended for a general adult audience. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children under 16 without the consent of a parent or guardian. If a competition or feature is open to children, we will say so and ask for parental consent where required. If you believe a child has given us personal data, please contact legal@agriculturaltrust.ie and we will delete it.

4. Why we use your personal data, and our legal basis

We only use your personal data where the law allows us to. The table below sets out what we do, and the legal basis under Article 6 GDPR that we rely on.

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered whether those interests are outweighed by your rights and freedoms, and concluded that they are not. You can ask us for more detail on that assessment, and you can object to processing based on legitimate interests — see section 10.

Where we rely on your consent, you can withdraw it at any time. Withdrawing consent does not affect the lawfulness of anything we did before you withdrew it.

5. Marketing and how to opt out

If you have consented to receive our newsletters or marketing emails, or you are an existing subscriber receiving information about similar products, you can stop them at any time by:

• clicking the unsubscribe link at the foot of any marketing email;
• updating your preferences in your account or through the preference link in our emails; or
• emailing legal@agriculturaltrust.ie or subs@agriculturaltrust.ie.

We will action your request promptly. You will still receive service messages relating to any subscription or account you hold — for example delivery notices, renewal reminders and receipts — because these are not marketing.

We do not sell your personal data.

6. Automated decision-making and profiling

We do not make decisions that produce legal effects concerning you, or similarly significantly affect you, based solely on automated processing.

We do use limited profiling to make our content and marketing more relevant — for example, grouping subscribers by the topics they read or the offers they respond to. You can object to this at any time by contacting us or by withdrawing your cookie consent.

7. Who we share your personal data with

We share personal data with the following categories of recipient, and only where there is a proper basis for doing so:

• Within The Agricultural Trust — with staff of our other titles where necessary to run our shared customer, subscription and marketing systems.
• Service providers acting on our instructions (processors), including:
  • HubSpot — our customer relationship management, forms, live chat, email marketing and consent management platform (data hosted in the EU);
  • Google (Google Analytics) — website analytics, where you have consented to analytics cookies;
  • our website hosting and IT support providers;
  • our subscription fulfilment bureau, printers and distribution partners, who receive the name and address data needed to deliver your magazine;
  • our payment processors, who process card payments on secure pages — we do not store full card numbers ourselves;
  • Apple and Google, where you subscribe through an app store.
• Professional advisers — our auditors, accountants, insurers and lawyers, where they need the information to advise us.
• Public authorities — where we are required to disclose information by law, court order or regulatory request.
• A buyer or successor — if we sell, transfer or reorganise any part of our business, in which case your data may transfer as part of that business.

All of our processors are bound by written contracts that require them to keep your data secure, use it only on our instructions, and delete or return it when the service ends. We keep a list of the entities with whom your personal data is shared, which is available on request.

8. Transfers outside the EEA

We aim to keep personal data within the European Economic Area (EEA). Our HubSpot data is hosted in the EU.

Some of our providers — including Google — are based in, or transfer data to, the United States or other countries outside the EEA. Where that happens, we make sure one of the following safeguards is in place:

• the country is covered by a European Commission adequacy decision (including the EU–US Data Privacy Framework, where the provider is certified under it); or
• the transfer is governed by the European Commission’s Standard Contractual Clauses, with additional technical and organisational measures where our assessment shows they are needed.

You can request a copy of the safeguards we rely on by emailing legal@agriculturaltrust.ie.

9. How long we keep your personal data

We keep personal data only for as long as we need it for the purposes set out in this policy, or for as long as the law requires. In practice:

When data is no longer needed we delete it, or anonymise it so it can no longer be linked to you.

10. Your rights

Under the GDPR you have the following rights in relation to your personal data:

• Access — to be told whether we hold personal data about you and to receive a copy of it.
• Rectification — to have inaccurate data corrected and incomplete data completed, without undue delay.
• Erasure — to have your data deleted where it is no longer needed, where you withdraw the consent it was based on, or where it has been processed unlawfully.
• Restriction — to have our use of your data limited in certain circumstances, for example while we check its accuracy.
• Objection — to object to processing based on our legitimate interests, and an absolute right to object to direct marketing at any time.
• Portability — to receive the data you gave us in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, and to have it transmitted to another controller where technically feasible.
• Withdraw consent — at any time, where our processing is based on consent.
• Not to be subject to automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects.

To exercise any of these rights, contact legal@agriculturaltrust.ie or write to us at the address in section 2. We will respond within one month. That period may be extended by up to two further months for complex requests, and we will tell you if that happens. We may ask you for proof of identity before acting, so that we do not disclose your data to someone else. There is normally no charge.

11. Security

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your personal data against unauthorised access, loss, alteration or disclosure. These include encryption of our website traffic (HTTPS), access controls and role-based permissions, secure hosting, encrypted storage of passwords, staff training, and contractual protections with our suppliers.

No transmission over the internet is completely secure. Where you send us information over the internet, you do so at your own risk. If a personal data breach occurs that is likely to result in a risk to your rights and freedoms, we will notify the Data Protection Commission, and you where required, in line with our legal obligations.

12. Complaints

If you are unhappy with how we have handled your personal data, please tell us first at legal@agriculturaltrust.ie so we can try to put it right.

You also have the right to lodge a complaint with the Irish supervisory authority:

Data Protection Commission
21 Fitzwilliam Square South, Dublin 2, D02 RD28
Website: www.dataprotection.ie
Phone: +353 1 765 0100 / 1800 437 737

13. Third-party websites

garden.ie contains links to other websites, including those of advertisers, retailers, garden owners and event organisers. This policy does not apply to those websites. We are not responsible for their content or their privacy practices, and we encourage you to read the privacy notice of any website you visit.

14. Changes to this policy

We review this policy regularly and may update it to reflect changes in our services, our systems or the law. The current version is always published at garden.ie and takes effect when posted. The date at the top shows when it was last changed. Where a change is significant, we will bring it to your attention — for example by a notice on the website or an email to registered users.