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Cheap Tricks: Move That Plant!
| Katie Elzer-Peters
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>> Published Date: 4/25/2012
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 The more you sell, the more new items you can bring in, and the more often your customers will come back to browse. You don’t need a fortune for these display ideas, either. A hammer or screwdriver and a can of paint will take care of most of them. Others are just about artful arrangement.
1 & 2 Create a Beautiful Picture
Merchandising is a visual tool. Use the plants and hardgoods you sell as “artist supplies” and create compelling pictures. Flora Grubb Gardens displays different chair and table colors as a collage on the side of their building. Much more interesting than a book of swatches!
Succulent Gardens in Castroville, California, creates plant mosaics with merchandise for their Flower Show sales booths. It’s impossible to leave with just one plant when you see how pretty they look next to each other. This technique works well with any small-sized item or plant pot size. It’s kind of like gum in the grocery store checkout line!
 3 Differentiate
These days, people can get plants anywhere—including the grocery store. Why should they come to you? Make a display that highlights unusual or interesting plants that only you have available. During summer 2011, Terrain at Styer’s greeted customers with this display of 18 different echinacea. Coneflower collectors were all over this!
4 & 5 Provide Context
At Flora Grubb Gardens in San Francisco, California, it’s easy to see how these giant pieces of garden art could become part of a home garden. Rather than having them sitting in rows along the parking lot, designers have created a garden of complementary plants around these sculptures. Instead of a reaction along the lines of “What am I going to do with a giant metal spike?” this arrangement inspires a “Must find room for the sculptures and the plants!” enthusiasm.
 At Molbak’s Garden + Home in Seattle, Washington, colorful glass sculptures are displayed with pond floats and water lilies, giving customers ideas about how to incorporate art into the garden.
6 & 7 Encourage DIY Design
To ensure that customers keep adding flowers and plants to their home and garden, set up project stations with everything needed to complete a weekend garden addition. Flora Grubb Gardens shows customers how to make a living wall with tillandsias. The purple-painted wall provides an example. Below the wall, the metal brackets, plants and glue needed for the project are all available for purchase.
Terrain at Styer’s has a “Terrarium Bar” with all of the plants, soil containers, tools, and accessories needed to make terrariums. It’s much easier for customers to go hog-wild over a new project (good for your bottom line) if all of the materials are in one convenient spot. Notice the example terrariums to give inspiration amongst the supplies.
8 Create Grab-and-Go Gardens
This trick is something that every single garden center can do, and more should do. This photo is six years old, and from a little, nameless roadside garden center in Michigan. If they can do it, so can you! Gardeners are nervous, pressed for time, and many are new to the hobby. Help them out by creating plant displays that translate right to the garden. Customers can buy one or three of each plant, go home, and have an instant garden.
9 & 10 Use Props
Molbak’s Garden + Home is also great at merchandising with props. The rock garden/alpine plant display has a sign (not pictured) that says “Rock Candy,” and a display created on multiple tiers of benches (to create a mountain) with boulders and tree stumps for “ambience.” Want to know what that plant looks like between two rocks? No problem—the display does it for you.
Hanging plants, or “spillers,” are displayed in “gutter garden” assemblies. In the case of both the rock garden plants and the cascading container plants, the display in the garden center mirrors the function of the plants in the home garden. GP
Katie Elzer-Peters is a longtime gardener and the owner of The Garden of Words, LLC, and GreatGardenSpeakers.com, two businesses that provide services to garden-industry companies. She can be reached at katie@thegardenofwords.com.
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