Nurturing New Gardeners
One of the bright spots that came from 2020 is the number of people who spent more time gardening. It’s difficult to quantify how many new gardeners 2020 produced, but the evidence of their activity is abundant. Seventy one percent of garden retailers reported a significant sales increase. Seed companies sold out quickly in late March with many experiencing historic, record-breaking sales as fears of food shortages, unemployment, and price hikes drove people to invest in growing their own food.
Professionals in the horticulture industry — myself included — watched with an odd sort of fascination at this gardening boom, in part because we’ve been searching for ways to make horticulture relevant for a new generation. Millions of dollars have been spent on marketing surveys and advertising campaigns to try and crack the code and none yielded what we saw because of the pandemic.
With a new growing season just around the corner and data from 2020 gardening trends becoming available, I’m cautiously optimistic these new gardeners will stick with gardening. In a recent survey from Axiom Marketing, 86% of those who gardened in 2020 plan to garden the same or more this year. Eighty-two percent of 2020 gardeners felt successful, with 65% describing themselves as beginning or casual gardeners.
What’s more, the same survey indicated the top reason people gardened in 2020 was to beautify their outdoor space; growing fruit and veggies came in third place. If you’re curious, “enjoying growing plants” occupied the number two slot.
This fascinates me because while these reasons to garden aren’t mutually exclusive, I’m a little surprised growing food didn’t occupy the top spot for 2020, given how the season began. People came to gardening in a panic and discovered a fundamental truth along the way: it isn’t just about what you produce, it’s also about the process. It seems possible the pandemic catalyzed this discovery as people searched for ways to escape at home, spend time with family members in the same household, and mark the passage of time in meaningful ways. Takeaway: the reason a person begins gardening won’t necessarily be the same reason they continue.
Here’s where a bit of caution sneaks into my optimism. I want to know how our industry is planning to nurture these pandemic-convert gardeners. When I say “our industry” I mean everyone in horticulture, from nurseries and garden centers to botanical gardens, extension educators, garden writers, designers, and YouTube personalities. We all have a role to play and we all need to own this moment. I especially hope we see that nurturing emerging gardeners is bigger than simply adding to our bottom line. The reasons to garden and the lessons we learn transcend the soil.
So how should we approach this moment and how do we nurture these new gardeners? In the words of Simon Sinek, I would suggest we “start with why.” It isn’t enough to define gardeners based on what or where they grow, whether it’s containers or plots, vegetables or flowers, urban or rural, indoors or out. These things don’t (and shouldn’t) define our identity or be what makes us happy.
And let’s not segregate gardeners based on skill, whether we intend to or not. Professional horticulturists, master gardeners, amateurs, novices. These labels speak to training and experience, but they’re still only labels. When we strip them away I imagine the reasons we garden — our whys — are more similar than not. I’ve met “amateur” gardeners who posses the skill and experience and intuition on par with a “professional horticulturist” yet lack confidence and self esteem. Their confidence in many ways comes down to the label we’ve given them which they’ve in turn accepted, a trend we’ve allowed to continue for far too long.
At our core — and 2020 drove this home — no matter where or how we garden, we garden because of how it makes us feel. Sowing seeds is sowing hope for the future. Digging in the soil can be a meditation. Every gardener has a powerful “why” and I wager it’s less about the product of a “finished garden” and the credentials it took to create than it is the process of gardening itself.
Let’s spend more time talking about why we garden. Rather than identifying and segregating gardeners by what we grow or how we grow it, let’s celebrate how it feels to be a gardener. Like so much of life, there is far more that unites gardeners than divides us and we have more in common than we may realize.
