Florida garden centers offer a variety of great ideas for members of the GCA Summer Tour

Tuesday’s second leg of the Garden Centers of America Summer Tour included stops at three garden centers, each of which featured compelling practices or features that had the 100-plus “tourists” taking notes. Here are some highlights of what they saw at Busy Bee Lawn & Garden Center, Rock City Gardens and Rockledge Gardens.

*** Busy Bee Lawn & Garden Center in Vero Beach, Fla., is a “smallish” retail outlet (2.6 acres) that has top-quality tropical plants in abundance, along with enough colorful annuals to spice both the plant yard and many of the area residents’ gardens. The store is just that – there is no growing done on the facility – and in addition to its retail plant, tools and giftware fare, Busy Bee specializes in educational programs held the second Saturday of each month.

One plus for the garden center is the way it uses yellow as the company’s signature color. All signage is either yellow or trimmed in yellow, and the staff wears yellow shirts to help them become easy to find in the covered area or out in the plant yard. Coincidentally, that’s also an ancillary benefit to merchants whose products are yellow or that are packaged in yellow. At Busy Bee those items stand out in displays and reinforce the branding theme color the company has chosen.

*** Rock City Gardens is spread over 7 acres in Wabasso, Fla., and offers a nice mix of beautiful tropical plants, annuals, perennials, trees and shrubs and specialty plants. The store was created in 1966 and gradually became the area’s primary garden center destination and landscaping service.

Rock City features a gift shop with an array of elegant home items (perfect for the affluent clientele in the region) and does an excellent job using tables, ladders and shelves to serve as displays of the various items inside the gift center and on its porch, which extends from each side of the building.

Rock City uses a simple yet very practical means to greet visitors to the garden center. There’s a folding, A-frame chalk board at the entrance that tells shoppers what items are “specials of the day or week.” Also, as soon as customers enter, they can pick up a cart from the store’s cart barn to begin their shopping adventure.

*** Rockledge Gardens in Rockledge, Fla., is a tour de force retail store that has practically anything a customer could want – including ambiance. The facility is huge – the retail garden center is 5 acres, and across the highway there are 10 more acres for growing trees, palms, bamboo and shrubs. Rockledge has roofs over a number of shopping areas, each stocked with quality product that is merchandised expertly via displays and vignettes that do an excellent job of saying “buy me” to shoppers.

There’s also a meeting room that staff and area civic groups use for conferences, a children’s playground – and a store “mascot,” a Volkswagen beetle that bears the company name and helps brand the garden center every time someone enters the premises.
Rockledge does many things very well, from the aforementioned merchandising prowess to its noticeably helpful staff. Store owner Theresa Riley said she and husband Kevin are contemplating adding a café as the next expansion project; if it goes through, the dining area would become part of the meeting room building.

One striking visual proponent of Rockledge Gardens is its use of color throughout the grounds. Each building is painted in a bright hue such as yellow, light blue or pink, and its signage is colored to match the area in which customers find themselves.