Gardeners' Wish List for Garden Centers

Susan Harris is one of the voices at GardenRant, and also writes her own blog, Takoma Gardener.

Garden centers of North America, I bring you greetings from your best customers -- the avid gardeners who write and read garden blogs. As one of the opinionated writers of GardenRant, I was asked to tell you what we really want from garden centers, to create a "wish list" of sorts. I put the question to my online co-conspirators and our readers and here's the resulting rant. (Don't worry; we call anything we feel strongly about a rant.) We want:

1. Staff who love to garden and share their knowledge and enthusiasm on the sales floor and in seminars or workshops about propagation, pruning, design, eco-friendly gardening techniques, and more. And naturally these workers are taking good care of your -- soon to be our -- plants.

2. Good information about the plants you sell, starting with all possible names (Latin, cultivar and common) and close at hand a definitive source for our research needs -- say a waterproof plant encyclopedia. (We're especially interested in growth rates and want to know both the USDA and the regional zone.) Same goes for your pesticide-fertilizer department, where the simple presence of good IPM advice would encourage us to let down our guard and trust you a bit. Then if it's possible to sit down with a cold drink while we're perusing your research materials, we might just stick around and keep on buying.

3. A different (and much more interesting) selection than we see in the big boxes. In fact, we'll go so far as to encourage you to ignore any advice you may be getting about dumbing down your products and your message to appeal to big-box shoppers. You know -- to emphasize the decoration of outdoor rooms rather than the growing of actual plants in them. One commenter wrote to ask for varieties that are "something special: bigger, hardier, more beautiful, more weird, especially well suited to the local growing conditions."

4. And yes, real gardeners really, really want to buy plants in the fall, so can we figure out a way to make that happen, everybody?

5. Ideas, inspiration, possibilities. Displays of plant combinations. Maybe Staff Favorites posted nearby -- we totally love it when bookstores do this -- with photos of plants in their gardens and blurbs about why they love them.

Granted we're not the typical big-box shopper, so it's no wonder that dumbing down just turns us off. But as a passionate and engaged minority of the shopping public, we constitute as enthusiastic a group of garden center shoppers as you're likely to encounter. Just appeal to our desire to create beautiful, eco-friendly gardens and we'll enthusiastically give you more money than we should.

As a private gardening teacher, I'm often hired by gardener-wannabes who've avoided your stores because they so often find them unhelpful and intimidating. But these same beginners would run, not walk to a garden center that provided 1 through 5 above, especially if you had an effective way of communicating with them. And the cheap-and-easy way to do that is online and if your Web site and your electronic newsletter aren't fabulous, they should be. You might even hire a gardenblogger to do your online writing, as some of you have done already. (Just drop me a line -- I'm not kidding.) And by the way, your blog has achieved fabulousness and deserves a big GardenRant rave.

--Susan Harris, guest blogger

Comments

[Carol]

I'm glad Susan listed 'staff who love to garden' first. Unfriendly, untrained staff with little to no knowledge of plants leave me cold and my wallet shut tight. I want to buy from people who love plants as much as I do, who I know have cared for the plants and labeled them properly so when I get home, there are no surprises or disappointments.

[Sarah on behalf of Kathy Jentz]

Expanding on point #4 - I think many are turned off by tired, bedraggled plants in the fall. Would be nice to get a "fresh" crop at that time or at least ones that don't look half-dead. I know it will be a big inventory headache - but an idea to keep the planting season going.

[Richard]

As a gardener I do agree with your points however, many of todays garden centre shoppers are not Gardeners. How do we appeal to them, what are they looking for, is selection important to them or helping them with solutions to garden problems? Help them put together an experience, don't show them the work of gardening. This can almost be considered a 4 letter word to some.
This is why they go to the big box stores. It is not intimidating. Quick, easy and painless. Garden Centres intimidate them with all that latin, and long aisles of endless plant material in alphabetical order. Sometimes those that work there are "horticultural snobs". Looking down their green thumb at them. Non-gardeners of today are not like our parents of yester- year. They do not have a keen interest in doing it for themselves. It seems that they, many a time, want someone to do it for them. The twenty somethings and early thirty somethings want to know what looks great and where to plant it. Garden Centres of today need to realize and embrace the fact that they have 2 profile customers to work with. The true gardener (baby boomer) and the non-gardener (gen x and y). (these are generalities I know) They can market to both quite effectively. Garden Centres should look at this as lucky! Let's be helpful but not snobs. Let's give them the knowledge they need without making them feel intimidated. Garden centres are defintiely the place to get your plant material and "most of the time" the place to get your gardening answers. Independant Garden Centres need to make themsleves more accesible to those who are not as comfortable with the pastime of gardening. Let's make gardening fun and fashionable. This does not mean "dumb it down". It means pass along our passions in a language and style that they (non-gardeners) can embrace and make their own.