Gardening is a personal experience. When spending time outside, people like to feel that they’re in a place of their own making — a place that suits them. This may be why gardeners are beginning to see the value of customized theme gardens that fit their own tastes and sensibilities. Garden center retailers are also starting to see the value in displaying and offering ideas for theme gardens that customers can implement at home.
These themed display gardens also have the potential to take a business beyond the realm of retail and turn it into a visual destination that customers will happily take a road trip to see. This has been a particularly successful strategy for Winter Greenhouse.
Located in Winter, Wis., visitors to Winter Greenhouse can tour an expansive display garden area, covering roughly 1.5 acres, and find sections of everything from shade and sun gardens, water gardens, rock gardens, natives, edibles and many other themes. The team at Winter Greenhouse also installs themed gardens and landscapes at customers’ homes.
The landscaping division of Winter Greenhouse offers a highly customized experience for customers, including optional garden themes such as herb, fragrant, butterfly, cutting, native and rock gardens.
Themes on display include rock, shade and pollinator gardens.
General Manager Jim Wilson says the display gardens have been a central aspect of the business since shortly after Winter Greenhouse opened in 1984. The landscaping side of the business has been operating for about eight years. The home landscape installations used to be done on properties up to 100 miles away, but Wilson says the radius has become more focused.
“Now we try to keep it within 50 miles,” Wilson says. “We’re kind of in the hub of three or four bigger towns that are 30 to 35 miles away, so we have to travel around. [The town of] Winter is just 330 [residents], there’s not much local business for us, so we have to travel a bit.”
Located in rural Wisconsin, Winter Greenhouse isn’t exactly inundated with nearby high-population cities. Wilson says this created a need for the display gardens early on: Customers needed a destination to make the trip worthwhile and memorable.
“From the beginning, when we started, there wasn’t that much going on,” Wilson says. “Our display gardens, for us, were crucial in a way, because we’re so remote, we had to get something to attract people out here. That, plus the variety of plants that we had. We really got into a wide variety because we had to be able to pull people so that they would come and stay for a while and make it worth the trip."
Read the rest of this story from the July issue here.
Photos courtesy of Winter Greenhouse.