The garden retail category…full of confusion

Keeping up with what is happening in the garden retail category is confusing at present.

One report was published just before the Chelsea Flower Show based on work done by the RHS which showed that in the UK Millennials and Gen X were not gardening due to the lack of guidance from their parents. As a result they are likely to develop low maintenance gardens, read paving. Only 1% had garden lessons at school, compared with 55% of their grandparents.

In the same week another report came out in the UK that showed that Brits wasted 672 million pounds a year in their gardens.

• 19% of them buy plants and forget to water them.
• 1 in 10 cannot tell the difference between a weed and a flower
• The average Brit spends 36 hours a year on the garden while a Millennial spends on average 28.5 hours a year in the garden.

This from a nation of gardeners!!!

Now move to the USA and again in the same week I came across The National Garden Survey for 2015.

• In 2015 the average America spend $401 a year on their garden.
• This is compared to $317 the year before.
• There are 6 million more gardeners in the USA in 2015 compared to the year before,
• 36% of them have a food garden and 34% of them have flower garden.

Can you see why I am confused…what is happening in this category