I will be giving my annual talk to the Auburn Garden Club this Monday. This will be about the eighth time I have spoken and its fun to do since this is a very active club with over a hundred in attendance at my last talk. The theme is always what’s new and exciting at the nursery. Generally we will talk about new plant introductions, garden supplies, or trends that are appearing.
Monrovia Nursery sent me quite a number of their new plant introductions to take to the event, so we will discuss those as well as our greater emphasis on gardening naturally as we talked about at this post.
There is no doubt this is a trend as I received my latest issue of “Garden Chic, the art of niche retailing.†Over all this is one of the better trade magazines I receive and the latest issue dealt with how to be successful in the organic market. I opened this magazine the day after I posted about this very subject. In addition there is a great article about how to involve the kids at the nursery which we also discussed. This shows that these trends are just starting to be recognized by my industry and those who embrace these ideas will be some of the first to do so.
There was also an article on The Natural Gardener in Austin (warning: when the web page opens a you hear a rooster crow, irritating!) and how they have captured the organic market in that area. It’s a great piece and fun to read. But just so you know why blogging is important to me I had a number of comments from some readers that live in Austin after I had written a post last year. They informed me of this place then and I had checked out their web page, so it was fun to read about it yesterday in the magazine.
One complaint I have is in the section of the magazine called “you can!†It say’s “What not to do in the garden? An online blog provides insight on what many frown upon. Among the hated looks-plastic, in-ground walkway lights, lining every which way of every walkway: ‘It looks like a landing strip for an alien spacecraft.’ Military formation-style plantings with boring shrubs lined up like soldiers didn’t go over very well, either. Overuse of mulch stacked too deep and high around trees to form the infamous ‘Volcano’ look was also noticed.
Now I can’t remember weather I read that in Garden Rant or another blog, but it would be nice if they give credit to the blog. Calling it an “online blog†is unfair to the author. It’s nice to see garden blogs being noticed, but give credit where credit is due.