The September issue of Garden Center magazine featured an article that showed garden centers how they can help customers use Prides Corner Farms' American Beauties native plants to craft their landscapes into National Wildlife Federation Certified Wildlife Habitats. Here, Tim Kane, sales and marketing manager for Prides Corner Farms, offers more tips for garden center operators interested in the program.
GC: How did American Beauties become involved with the wildlife habitat certification program?
Kane: Through our affiliation with the National Wildlife Federation through our American Beauties Native Plants program. It was a natural vehicle for the NWF to push their backyard habitat program and for American Beauties to push their ability to create gardens for the homeowner to successfully bring wildlife to the backyard.
GC: What changes have you seen in the past few years regarding the nation’s embracing wildlife in general, and then, particularly, in the home/lawn/landscape? How have your plants figured in the process?
Kane: Homeowners and the public as a whole have really embraced having wildlife habitats in their landscapes especially in the last couple of years with the emergence of the "green movement." Of course, they are far happier when the wildlife doesn’t proceed to consume the habitat they have created (like deer in our area will). The way we have sold our plants through the years has always encouraged and played up the interaction with wildlife. We were trend-setters in the industry over a decade ago packaging plants that attract birds, butterflies or hummingbirds to the landscape. The American Beauties Native Plants program is just an extension and a more focused version of these past sales programs that has stuck a more resonant chord with a more receptive, more caring public that is primed to embrace and advocate for backyard wildlife and native plants.
GC: What advice would you give to a garden center operator interested in embracing the program – or, at least, in learning more about it?
Kane: The best advice I would give is that you must wholeheartedly embrace the idea of selling native plants for backyard habitat as a buyer and as a garden center. Too many times garden centers buy things like the American Beauties program they think are exciting but fail to devote the necessary effort and education in house to let it resonate with their customers…they put it out in their nursery and expect it to sell itself. It just doesn’t work that way…very few things do!
We have found that the garden centers that live and breathe the concept and are excited by the idea will outsell a like sized garden center involved in this type of program by 4-or-5 to 1. Customers want to be excited about things but they still need the garden center to educate them about exciting things in order for them to get excited! It is work but the garden center that works at it will be rewarded and customers will be far less price focused as a result of the value they receive back from the garden center…this is a concept that every independent garden center should find exciting.
For more, visit the American Beauties Native Plants website, which features great homeowner information on the possibilities of natives, wildlife and the home landscape.