The Garden Dispatch: Selling Dreams; Dealing with Reality

Katie Elzer-Peters

I live on a street of modest houses on large lots. The homes were built in the 1970s and are a mixture of ranch-style and split-level—staples of the period. There are mature trees (where the homeowners haven’t cut them down). Our street, a mile long, isn’t filled with fancy or magazine-worthy homes, but it’s filled with beautiful and eccentric gardens in between the mow-blow-and-go landscapes.

There’s Ann’s garden. It’s entirely in pots. It’s a 1-acre lot with, probably, 500 pots. There are roses and sunflowers and verbena and mums, and even a few trees in pots. “I don’t like snakes,” she said to me one time as an explanation.

Then you have my garden. We dug up half of the front yard, because it seemed dumb to leave grass between the two big trees up front and the flowerbed we were planning next to the sidewalk. It’s loosely designed, but also kind of a wild mess because I like big plants and I cannot lie. I also cannot bring myself to cut them back.

Next to us, our neighbors tried the same thing, and, bless their hearts (as we say in the South), it’s a mess. But I’ll come back to them.

Down the street you go and you’ll find two gardens facing each other. One is clearly the work of someone who owns a landscaping business. Across the street, with nearly the same layout but a lot more weeds, is someone who appears to be propagating plants. There are black plastic nursery pots with baby crape myrtles and azaleas growing out through holes in the bottom. Keep driving and you’ll pass a house with a yard transformed into a (young) permaculture installation complete with chickens and fruit trees.

In between the more notable installations, there are fairly run-of-the-mill landscapes with a few trees, some shrubs and maybe a container planting or four or five.

Where am I going with this? Two things:

1. All of these people are your customers. Well, most of them. The ones who cut down all of their trees and have only grass in their yards might not really be your customers. Everyone else is. So you’re looking at hugely different ranges of knowledge and experience that you have to address when someone walks in the door.

2. Many of these people got their ideas from magazines, newspapers, Pinterest or books and what they think is going to happen and what actually happens when they grow plants are two different things.

The gap between what the magazine promises and what reality presents can be heartbreaking, especially for someone trying something for the first time.

My neighbors bit off more than they can chew and they really can’t understand why their garden looks nothing like ours when I have easily spent 20 or 30 times the money they’ve spent over the past six years and I do this for a living. (I know they feel this way because they tell me about it repeatedly.)

There’s plenty of talk about body image and magazines, and the false image those publications present to people, screwing up their ability to look at themselves and find beauty. However, there’s not so much about the home and garden front. Well, gardens are not exactly life and death—I mean it’s much worse for someone to not take care of himself or herself because of looks, but gardening is life or death for you guys, because it’s your business!

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer for this—I’m actually curious to hear what your answers are. Maybe drop me an email at Katie@thegardenofwords.com and we’ll do a follow up. How do you bridge the gap between the pretty picture and the reality? How do you help customers create their own pretty pictures that are reality? Are you actively selling and helping, or just running the cash register? GP

Katie Elzer-Peters is a garden writer and owner of The Garden of Words, LLC, a marketing and PR firm handing mostly green-industry clients. Visit her website at www.thegardenofwords.com.