Gardening's Image Problem Part 1

Something tells me we need a makeover.

Over the course of the past 5 to 10 years it has become apparent that the garden industry and gardening as an activity have an image problem.  Garden clubs are oblivious to their aging membership.  Locally owned garden centers struggle to make profits and blame their blight on the prices at the box store down the street.  Growers meet every winter with their broker rep and ask "What's new?" only to order the exact same plant material as the past five years (and their competitors).  Breeders celebrate a "game-changing" variety while their hired PR specialists ponder over how to market yet another red petunia.  And everyone is asking "how do we get 'young people' to like us?".

Some in the industry say our focus should be on schools and children, incorporating gardening and food harvesting into curricula through school gardens, field trips, and other activities.  This is an excellent effort to get kids outside, to play with the earth, and get their hands dirty all the while learning about gardening.  However, I'm not 100% convinced that participating in a school garden will lead to future gardeners.  Growing up I personally was encouraged to make mud pies, was a member of my town's junior garden club, grew marigolds in Girl Scouts, and planted a tree for Arbor Day with Mrs. Silver's 2nd grade class, but every spring Saturday when my parents would ask for my help dividing the hostas and spreading mulch I refused.  Adamantly.  Dividing hostas and spreading mulch was in my teenager mind Manual Labor and neither entertaining nor worth my time.  I'd rather be hanging out at my friend's pool listening to N'Sync.  I wouldn't enjoy gardening and spreading mulch until later in college.

Happy Plant Science college students, c2006

I have found similar stories with friends of mine, both in and outside the industry.  Nichole and Brian don't garden because Nichole works 40hrs a week while Brian finishes his masters in engineering.  They have a small space in their back yard for a couple hops plants Brian uses for his home brewing hobby.  Wendy, a recent law grad, music lover, and foodie doesn't garden due to space limitations with her Brooklyn studio apartment, but has a collection of herb plants she uses regularly to season her favorite recipes when she hosts Saturday Night Dinner.  Courtney, an accomplished photographer for a number of blogs and home & garden magazines doesn't garden because it's such a labor intensive activity "where you get dirty."  She does however purchase a bouquet of flowers on occasion at Reading Terminal Market.

Another friend, Dani, a past wine sommelier and budding agriculturalist, works at a market in Brooklyn where he helps curate the farms and companies who participate.  On his apartment balcony he grows a few dozen varieties of tomatoes every year to concoct the perfect summer salad, and has become quite the heirloom fanatic.  Dani purchases plants from one of my customers and favorite garden centers in Brooklyn -- Crest Hardware & Garden Center.  However Dani has qualms with garden centers -- actually, he hates them.  The "bland Costco layout makes it incredibly difficult to shop and visualize" his garden at the store.  It doesn't help too that the plethora of products offered is unappealing to his 29 year-old male self, referring here to all the lawn ornament and "gifty" stuff (seriously, it's all crap from China, so why offer it?).

Whether they state it or not, all of these friends "garden" even though they don't classify it as gardening.  In their minds they are supplying their home-brewing hobby, trying delicious new food recipes, decorating a home.  Not only are Generation X/Y consumers changing the way consumers shop, read books, and communicate, they are changing the action and therefore definition of "gardening".  Fellow industry colleague Chris has found when polling neighbors that "gardening" means "planting herbs and vegetables", while a "gardener" means "you're old".  In an effort to rid ourselves of the old ladies wearing loud hats at their elite garden club luncheon at the country club image, do we change the image or gardening or do we develop a new term?

So where do we go from here?  Who do we target -- Rookie Gardeners like Dani, Courtney, Wendy, Nichole and Brian, as they change the definition of gardening, or younger Millennials who don't have plants on their radar yet (come on, people, they just got INTO college)?  What is the new definition of gardening, and how do we adapt to the changes consumers are indirectly forcing onto the industry?  How do we adapt the garden center and shopping experience to appeal to Gen X/Yers?

This is what I'm pondering.

Plant on and rock on,
Stephanie

Song for the Garden: It's Tearing Up My Heart - N'Sync

Sex & the City or Plants? Choose Wisely

First off, I hope all of you who are Mid-Atlantic and New England readers are safe and at home as Hurricane Sandy comes blundering in.  Let's hope the power stays on long enough to publish this post!

An article was published today in Today's Garden Center Magazine by their new associate editor, Karli Petrovic.  The article, titled 'Why I'm Not Gardening (... And No One Else My Age is Either)', is an op-ed discussing why Gen Yers are not giving garden centers a portion of their purchasing power.  Karli claims that commitment issues are not at stake, but instead that 'gardening' is seen as 'work'.  If I remember correctly, I think I made this very claim two weekends ago at a cocktail party with fellow industry leaders.  Bob at Dickman's, correct me if I'm wrong.  And important to note, the last cocktail party I had been to was in July - quite the dry spell for a Gen Yer and I'm sure Karli would agree.

There are many garden center owners and buyers who are probably reeling in their seats after reading this article.  The blasphemous double speak!  The poor cash-strapped Gen Yer!  Oh those Gen Yers who only want to spend their money on booze and clothes -- they're so detached from the real world!  I partially agree with them, but realize that I too was once in Karli's "WOOO! Post College!" mindset.  Yes, in grad school I'd rather spend my tip money from working as a barista on drinks at Pixel.  Yes, I used to have a much more extensive wardrobe.  However, note the past tense -- there has over time been a change in my mindset, and even though at 23 I wasn't ready for plants, I wasn't ready for a pet or a child either for that matter.  But what I was or wasn't ready for was not the same for ALL 23 year old's, or ALL of my friends.  One important take away for the readers AND Karli: beware of superlatives and over reaching generalizations.

However, I feel the true issue is not that gardening is perceived as work, but that the horticulture industry is not speaking or promoting plants in Gen Yers' terms.  We don't want to garden, we want to make Summer Salad with our neighbors and friends.  We don't want to garden, we want to have our own hops for our home-brewing project.  We don't want to keep a house-plant, we want to collect comic books.  Ok.  So that last example doesn't involve plants, but the collecting and nerdy culture of comics could easily be transmitted to collecting succulents and telanzias.  Make no mistake though -- those of us who do have container gardens, rooftop gardens, edible landscapes, house plants to make the apartment more "inviting to the ladies" sure as hell do NOT want large swaths of petunias as you'd see back in the 90s.  Those days are lame and gone, my friend.

Are you a Gen X/Yer who just recently started gardening?  I'd love to hear how you started living with plants, and why you enjoy it!  Please share your comments.

Maybe Karli needs to read my post from earlier this fall about killing plants.  It's alright Karli -- I kill mint too.

Plant on and rock on,
Stephanie

Song for the Garden: Little by Little -- Groove Armada

Hurry Up and Wait

In August I stumbled upon a Dutch bulb company while researching colors of amaryllis for work.  This happened to be during one of the hottest weeks of the year and my garden at home was looking as horrible as the neglected patch of invasive weeds in my neighbor's yard.  My garden was surely in need of a life makeover, and I was dreaming of cooler fall weather.  After browsing the online catalog, I put together a wish list and placed an order later that weekend with Nick.  We were excited (ok, honestly I was excited; Nick just thought ordering some plants was nice) for our future fall planting project in early October.  I also liked the fact that next spring we would have flowers for fresh cut bouquets.  The order confirmation noted the bulbs would arrive in late September.  Sweet!


Poppy Anemone 'Mixture', one of the items I ordered (and really want to plant)

In September I decided to schedule a week off from work for early October.  I was past due for a vacation and decided October would be a great time to have a stay-cation to spruce up the garden, put together some fall combination planters, and plant the order of bulbs.  Then I got an email from the bulb company: "Important Update Regarding Your Order."  The delivery date was MOVED!  Moved to LATE OCTOBER!  I was crushed with my plans for an idyllic gardening vacation thwarted.

The bulb industry side of horticulture is so different from the rest of the industry -- it seems to have a bit more whimsy, more magic, something you can't quite put your finger on but spark curiosity.  In college we learned about tulips and how they were a form on currency in ancient cultures, where different colors yielded different monetary values; if I remember correctly, one of the first "market bubbles" was the tulip market.  Seems almost too good of a story to be true; perhaps great tulip industry branding efforts?  Other parts of the industry just seem so unorganized.  My undergraduate advisor would receive shipments of free bulbs to use for research experiments.  Some years there would be more bulbs than research and my friend Cheni and I would spend part of our summer composting bulbs that had gone unused and rotted in the greenhouse coolers.  Then there's last year's Dig, Drop, Done campaign that was so campy I to this day have no idea whether consumers bought it, found it appalling, funny, whimsical, or just plain stupid.  Kind of like the email confirmation when my bulb order was placed: "For Zone 6a, expect your order to arrive between September 15th and November 15th."  It's amazing that the bulb industry can operate so lackadaisical, when the rest of the horticulture industry demands live inventory stats and immediate order confirmations.  Maybe this is just a bad experience with this particular bulb company (that's been in business mind you since 1818, or so their website states), but I seem to remember other bulb companies having similar work ethics.  Am I missing something here?  Do I just have over-rated expectations because I, like other Americans, sometimes have "I want it NOW" consumer habits?  Are the Dutch onto something with their more laid back attitudes?

At any rate, I still am missing my order of bulbs. Please send ASAP.  ::Sigh::

Plant on,
Stephanie

Song for the Garden: Now Generation - Black Eyed Peas

Fall in Love (Again)

I have fallen in love.  Again.  Thank goodness!  I feel as if I have awoken from a deep, Sleeping Beauty trance that left me feeling bland, old.  This month's issue of Green Profit, a trade magazine for the retail end of the horticulture industry, features an article that recaps the brilliantly successful pop-up retail outlet my friend Carmen and her company Nectar & Company created this spring.  Carmen had told me about the event's success back in July but reading the article yesterday refreshed my excitement to the point I had to visit the gym for two hours to calm down.  Carmen and her team created a gardening wonderland with different vignettes throughout the greenhouse that appealed to numerous audiences in their Georgia town.  The catch though was these vignettes were not just 'mini departments' within a larger 'store' - each had a story to tell through its strategically picked plant offerings, color scheme, and staging.  At every turn you didn't know what you would discover next; cleverness and creativity was oozing from every inch of the greenhouse.  I remember telling Carmen with excitement "I WISH I had BEEN there!!!".  The creative, stylish, and gardening-made-easy nature of the event energized and engaged customers to return two, three times throughout the weekend, making the event a complete sell-out.

Excitement is the exact feeling missing in the gardening industry right now.  Granted there are some of use with lots of spunk who are making a commotion, but the majority of growers, garden centers, and landscaping companies are one in the same.  Regardless of whether they are locally owned or part of a box store chain, everyone is offering the exact same lifeless plants.  Everywhere you go in the spring it's the same Filler-Spiller-Thriller combination planter, the same purple petunia, the same sweet basil, the same over growth-regulated mum and ornamental kale in the fall - like that Greek yogurt commercial: "plainly plain and samely same."  Makes you want to buy plants, right?  It's a poor business model if you ask me, when the gardening industry is vying for the same dollars we spend on our Starbuck's lattes, music from iTunes, Pandora bracelet charms, PlayStation video games, and annual batch of Titleist golf balls, ALL of whom have marketing campaigns exciting and praising the individuality of their customers.

So what does it take for consumers to "fall in love again" with plants?  Thinking of other things in life I love, the answer lies many times with memories of amazing experiences:

Love for Food: Tojo Sushi Restaurant, Vancouver, BC: My husband Nick cannot visit or talk about another restaurant without mentioning our night at Tojo.  We visited during our honeymoon, were treated like family by Tojo, his wife, and an ensemble of waiters and waitresses, ate like royalty, and laughed the whole night.  An experience we would buy $1000 flight tickets just to eat at the restaurant.

Love for Music: Fifteen years of ballet classes, ownership of every Supergrass album, and attending a Girl Talk concert all revived my love for music at different points in my life.  Whether a song, musical chord, genius Jerome Robbins choreography, or Girl Talk's unexpected combination of vocals from Peter Gabriel with the guitar rip from Space Hog, music invokes memories and experiences that I want to relive again and again.

Love for Fashion: a pair of Steve Madden Herringbone Twill Heels: Countless walks up Libe Slope, a Valentine's Day with best friends, and a drunken walk through 3-ft of snow with Mike and Arnaub, I've worn these shoes so many times I've repaired the heels three times.  If a simple pair of shoes does not render memories for you, or if you can honestly deny your closet holds a dress you haven't fit in since freshman year in college but keep to see if one day you can, perhaps it's time for a life makeover.

Love for a Sports Team: Go Tribe! Go Red!: Reinstated every Sunday with Fantasy Football, every summer with the smell of beer and Nathans hotdogs, every winter with the crisp smell of ice, people will die for their beloved sports teams.  Why?  The thrill of watching the winning homerun/touchdown/goal at the last second, a memory that sports fans retell year after year.

We fall in love with songs we danced to in high school, sweatshirts from our boyfriends, with baristas who make our lattes perfectly every time, and lust over the next ipad.  It's time growers, garden centers, and landscapers evoke the excitement and memories of consumers to help them fall in love with plants.

Plant on,
Stephanie

Song for the Garden (Center): The Wise Guys - Start the Commotion