Gardens by Kelly Productions

If you need someone to blame for yet another diatribe on Gen Y gardening, direct your browser to my friend Doug Green.  Feel free to give him credit too if you find this post praiseworthy.

I guess I feel like a broken record sometimes, preaching the good word about why Gen Y is the next best thing for horticulture (heck any new generation of consumers is, right?)  But I also realize that it can take the human mind 15-20 instances of repetition before committing a fact or impression to long-term memory.  I’m honestly not being facetious here, I just realize that it takes adamancy and tenacious repetition to effectively communicate worthy ideas.  Without getting too long-winded on a subject that’s dear and close, here I go again.

Here’s the best way I can state the problem:

Retailers and trade professionals are concerned that Gen Ys (and even Gen Xs to some degree) aren’t consuming horticultural products like generations before them.  They feel like the industry isn’t connected or geared to understand this generation and generally vex over change.

Fair enough?

Here’s the best way I can frame the solutions (for there are many):

Trade professionals need to fess up to one unyielding fact–the way we do business must change.  A classic example of what happens when you don’t change can be found in the headlines earlier this week: Park Seed Sold for $13 million.  When you fail to change your business model to meet the needs of a new audience, you’re doomed to failure.  This is likely the beginning of more sad news for Park Seeds, a could-have-been success story.  A company with tremendous history and a rich legacy buckled under poor management and waffled in world of stifled credit because it lacked (and no doubt will continue to lack) a cogent philosophy about how to sell gardening in the 21st century.  I could list more examples, but I digress.

I don’t know how plainly to make this case.  Gardening is a three-p concept:  people, plants, and passion. Watch this Youtube clip of yours truly if you need a visual.  Our business is about connecting the dots between those three or finding the point at which those intersect.  Let me break it down p by p…

People–In the last few years, we’ve learned something huge about gardening that may have been lost on us before.  Gardening can be a highly social activity while also being a very personal expression of self.  Gardeners of all ages photograph their favorite plants, post them to Twitter, Facebook their questions to their gardening friends, and blog about their experiences.  Great!

Now after stating the obvious, what does that imply for those of us in the trade?  We have to become vital parts of those networks.  Why?  Because we’re the leaders, the experts, the sources of information that people need for basic support and look towards for inspiration.  A lot of businesses and professionals get the first part.  They’ve got high-tech websites, their doing social networking, etc.  Again, great.  But it’s the last part that I find lost to blank stares.  In this age of high social connectivity, the last thing we should do is surrender our talents, creativity, skills, and knowledge to our audience.  We have a role to play in inspiring gardeners to want what they don’t know they need, to expose them to new, progressive ideas about how to garden sustainably, and new plants.  People are looking to us for information and inspiration, but are instead finding their questions sucked into a vacuum.

Plants–The ABCs of horticulture right here.  I’ve always chuckled at phrases like “plant-driven” design.  How else should garden design, or gardening in general be driven?  Gardens aren’t built of patio pavers, hardwood mulch, and high-priced ceramics.  They’re built from the ground-up with plants.  Recent estimates by academics show that of the over 250,000 flowering plants on this planet, we use just 5-6% horticulturally (~15,000 species).  The frontiers for exploration are vast!  Cool plants abound!  I firmly believe, regardless of demographics or generation, that people want to populate their spaces with cool plants.  They may not always appreciate every botanical or horticultural nuance, but they want a distinctive, dynamic space that spells them across their landscape, indoors or outdoors.  For anyone following the Gen Y beat, look to promote more native plants, tropicals, succulents, and outrageously colorful, versatile plants (hmm, edible landscaping?) in an effort to pique the taste and curiosity of people my age.  I’ll talk more about this in the weeks and months ahead, rest assured.

Passion–Here’s the big one.  We presently have no clue as an industry as to why people garden.  Little to none!  We’re scared to ask most times.  I find most garden centers much more concerned about things like “buying habits” and “display design.”  Think a little more macro for a minute.  Why do you garden?  Why do your clients garden?  When we can find some authentic answer to that question, we’re going to see gardens on every corner, more municipalities investing in high-quality public landscaping, and green everywhere.  Look at older cultures like that of the United Kingdom.  Gardening there is a fiber of society, a good and right thing to do “just because.”  In fact, I’d go so far to say that have one of the hippest gardening cultures on the planet.  Pick up an issue of Gardens Illustrated or The Garden, and you’ll see what I mean.  There gardening is an identity (read: I am a gardener), something I do believe we’re close to developing in this country given the resurgence of interest in growing food in the last few years.  I mean if foodies can translate passion through culinary arts, why can’t hortiholics translate passion through gardening?  We can, sure.  But we need to do it more.

In analogy form, we’re selling car parts, without telling our customers the difference between a Toyota and a Corvette. Or we’re selling the ingredients to the best chocolate cake without teaching them how to cook (we’re really good at recipes, but we all know how fatal just “following a recipe” can be).  We’ve got to own this challenge, not waffle in its wake.

Strategies:

1.  Let’s quit moping already.  I’m so sick of hearing frustrations vented about “lack of interest by Gen Ys in gardening” that I could scream.  Invest that worry time in a solution.  If someone prominent professed a lack of hope in my generation, quit listening.  They don’t get it.  Do you really think something as magnanimous and time-honored as gardening will disappear with one generation of American consumers?

2.  Let’s start talking about plants like they’re plants instead of furniture.  Sure it’s a worthwhile strategy to find the interface between home and garden and what plants mean to people.  I’m not knocking that.  But let’s do things like Pistil’s Nursery is doing in Portland, Oregon–creating a lifestyle around sustainability, cool plants, and the passion for growing plants.  This little destination garden center in an old neighborhood of North Portland sells everything from tomatoes to Allium sikkimense and Indigofera heterantha.  Crazy cool and it works!

3. Let’s craft a national narrative about gardening.  Our trade organizations could pool resources and have tremendous impact here (the florist organizations did this a few years ago).  The media and marketing environment is prime for this.  Let’s find gardening “celebrities” less interested in merchandise packages on TV-shopping channels and product tie-ins and more interested in why people garden, what plants they want to garden with, and inspiring people to garden and make art (see Growing a Greener World on PBS for an example).

I could go on.  Doug Green wants more gardening in gadgetry.  I can get behind that too.  What are your thoughts and ideas for making gardening more hip, fresh, and sustainably good-looking as a lifestyle choice?