If you’ve read this blog for a while you may remember that for a couple of recent years I worked at a local farm-and-garden-center. During that stint I wrote a blog post on a handful of humorous and thoughtful reflections sparked by the autumn end of the business. As spring comes on this year, and I make plans for my own garden, I’ve found myself reflecting on some things I noticed or learned during the spring seasons of that job.

– 1 –

I love flowers. I mean I really love flowers. I used to be under the impression that I just liked them moderately, but handling them and tending them every day just exploded a sheer sense of delight in the colors, the delicacy, the vibrancy, the shape and form and scent of leaves and blossoms, and a fascination with learning about the different varieties and how to grow them. I found a whole new creative outlet in choosing and arranging flowers for pots and window boxes. My favorite experiences were getting to put together some custom-ordered pots on my own, and helping people who would come in with a vague idea of what they wanted and say, “I’d like these colors, and about this height, and they need to be good with partial shade—what do you suggest?” This year my goal for my own flowers is to design some large deer-resistant pots in a particular color scheme, and as I make my lists of plants and plan how to arrange them in the pots, it’s pretty neat to realize how much knowledge I picked up on the job and how I can now put it to use as I need it.

– 2 –

There is no official limit to the number of times you can hit your head on the same hanging plant in one day. Yes, I know this from experience.

– 3 –

Pruning is not such a delicate task as I’d always thought. Before the greenhouses opened in the spring, we would trim back vining and creeping plants to keep them from sprawling too far out of their pots before opening day, and it amazed me how ruthlessly you can cut back plants like wave petunias, verbena, and even rosebushes in the early stages and then see them redouble and triple in size again. (It’s also, I must admit, easier to get comfortable with pruning when doing it on a large scale, and with someone else’s plants, instead of one small plant of your own where you’re nervous that one wrong snip will ruin it for the year!)

– 4 –

In sales, visibility is king. As an entrepreneur who has to grapple with marketing for my own books, this was interesting to notice. In a greenhouse with four rows of tables running lengthwise (meaning three aisles for customers to walk), the plants on the two middle tables (on either side of the main aisle) always seemed to sell fastest. Of course, it helped that many of the most popular flowers, like petunias, impatiens, and begonias, were originally on display there—but as the season went on and space opened up on those middle tables, other things were shifted into that space, and often a plant that had hardly sold at all suddenly started going like hotcakes once it was in that more visible position. Similarly, when a few plants of a type that didn’t sell very much were brought outside and displayed where customers’ eyes fell on them as they arrived, you’d often see an increase in people buying them. You can’t sell something if people don’t know it exists—and not everyone is there to go hunting in every corner.

The implications for indie book sales are interesting. It’s true, the internet gives us the ability to sell a product to a customer anywhere in the world, but in actual fact, there are far fewer book buyers who go hunting for just the perfect book than there are book buyers who buy because a book is in an easily visible position—e.g. on a bestseller list, a deal-of-the-day promotion, et cetera—caught their eye, like a dahlia or a geranium displayed right at the entrance to the greenhouse. It’s an interesting subject to ponder for entrepreneurs selling through a middleman, where we aren’t the ones in charge of which flowers get placed on the middle tables, so to speak. How can we best seek situations where we are?

– 5 –

The American home gardening industry is largely based on consumerism and disposability.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a great thing for people to enjoy planting flowers around their home, and I wouldn’t dream of discouraging it. But think about it for a minute. The vast majority of flowers bought at garden centers are annuals, which at the end of every season are pulled out and thrown away—meaning avid gardeners are spending hundreds and even thousands a year on new flowers. What’s more, all these plants are started in plastic trays and transplanted into plastic pots—thousands and thousands of plastic containers which will ultimately end up thrown away. Even though smaller businesses re-use containers to save expenses, sooner or later they end up brittle and broken and on their way to a landfill. I’m not suggesting we forswear annual plants, but when you compare the overwhelming disposability of American gardening in general with, say, a traditional English garden where perennials and shrubs form the backbone and annuals are finishing touches—it’s worth considering the ultimate costs.