Paying a late Sunday afternoon visit to my local Garden Centre last week, I was so impressed with the impact and colour on display in the plant area. The contrast with a visit to a similar garden centre on a Sunday in July twenty or thirty years ago is noteworthy. Credit to the ingenuity and creativity of modern garden retailers and the growers who supply them.Clearly designed to maintain interest in plants and gardening well into the mid-summer season, the sale of large herbaceous perennials in full bloom was keeping the tills ringing.
However, I can’t help being slightly concerned about the survival of many of the plants I saw making their way through the checkouts. Big, blousy and colourful, relying on a small rootball in a modest (well-watered) pot, their future demise when planted into dry baked borders may well be accompanied by deep disappointment in the young andinexperienced gardeners who purchased them.
In common with many other walks of life (fashion and beautyfor example) some media channels and retailers drive huge expectations and demand for instant gratification in the garden. I think we need to guard against fuelling unrealisticexpectations which, when unmet, lead to disappointment and frustration and risk driving new gardeners away.
So, maybe the next big challenge for garden retailers is how to encourage a deeper engagement in the creative hobby of gardening. Supporting life-long gardeners who derive satisfaction and a sense of achievement from nurturing and cultivating their plants and creating a garden. These are the consumers who will return week after week, month after month to spend and invest in their hobby. For them, satisfaction and pride lie in the successful creation and care of their garden – realistic expectations driven by a deeper understanding and ultimately resulting in a sense of achievement.
Investing in attracting, engaging and retaining theseconsumers will ultimately provide a better long-term return on investment. And the statistics support the view that there are plenty of them to target – according to HTA , nearly six in ten UK adults (55%) say that they participate in gardening as a hobby which is equivalent to 18.1 million UK adults, and one-third of all UK adults (33%) consider themselves regulargardeners, which makes it more popular than music concerts (24%), the cinema (29%) or sport and exercise (26%).