The new gardeners are emerging

Crisis? What crisis? The opposite is the case, in the garden business at any rate. That is the message in the Garden Trends Report 2022. Published annually for a number of years now by the Garden Media Group in the USA, the report for 2022, year three of the pandemic, appears especially optimistic.
"From crisis to innovation" is the headline under which the authors have set out their stocktake and trend forecast. Right from the outset they set an optimistic tone for everything that follows with the declaration that "we are in an economic boom". Even if they underpin most of their assertions with US economic data - for example, that the National Retail Federation (NRF) predicts retail growth of 10.5 per cent - the trends are also reflected on this side of the Atlantic and many can be applied to Europe and Germany, perhaps even the prognosis that "2022 could be the strongest year since 1984".
This assumption is only logical if we interpret 2021 in the same way as the Garden Trend Report: it was "the great reset". People have gone from being "cautious planners" to acting according to the "yolo" principle: "You only live once."
What does that mean for the garden? Or more accurately, for customers, manufacturers and retailers in the garden market? The report authors advise garden professionals to bear in mind platforms such as Etsy, where creatives reinvent themselves, and of course Instagram, where they can see how their target groups live.
The report also shows that these people seek their salvation not only on the Internet. Half of the customers from Generation Z (53 per cent) and the millennials (49 per cent) are undertaking to order less on Amazon and all feel guilty when they do their shopping there. Offering opportunities to buy from local businesses, giving consumers the feeling of spending their money close to where they live, might therefore give rise to promising concepts such as plant shops around the corner.
A detailed look is taken in the report at the zones that consumers divide their home into and how these zones are designed, including the use of plants. How the façade or front zone looks from the pavement ("curb appeal") and how the entrance area is laid out is more important than ever on social media channels. Attractive, low-maintenance plants in tubs are consequently in demand.
In the kids' zone, trampolines and playhouses are trendy, together with trees and shrubs with thick foliage for camouflage and shade. Then there is the work-from-home…