Gardening worked fine for me, except for one thing: it was 1 AM game time when I last saved, and nothing grew that morning, plus, some of my mature plants were reset to "Growing". They worked fine the next day.
Not only did they add the collection journal (bug: I had one sim that had never harvested a plant, and it showed the fish list under his plant tab), the graphics are different - I cut a couple gems and the picture on the inventory item was much bigger. I don't know if they accidentally changed all the graphics to the large version, but I liked it.