Yardeners

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Fran and Dee – you both asked for backup.

Here is my original piece:

"Yardeners" are indeed "home landscapers".  I do not try to even suggest they become gardeners, because that word turns them off; they are afraid of it.  My goal is to help the yardener/home landscaper be successful taking care of the plants in their yard.  If some get really interested and become gardeners, then God bless.  But if they end up maintaining an attractive healthy home landscape, then that is a good thing. I have some marketing numbers that might be of interest.  The National Gardening Assoc asserts that there are 60 million gardeners in the country and it is the largest outdoor hobby in America.  That is nonsense because they define "gardener" as anyone owning a single plant.

There are roughly 70 million homes in this country with property attached that the home owner must care for. About 10 million of those homeowners have someone else or a company care of their property, a very large number in my view. That gets us to the gardeners.  My definition of a "gardener" is someone that consciously considers "gardening" to be their hobby.  It is a pastime that is enjoyable and to be looked forward to.  Without going into my rationale or sources ( ask me off list if you want) I have concluded that there are about 4 to 5 million "serious gardeners", about 2 million "vegetable gardeners", and 5 to 6 million folks who have a garden, think of themselves as a gardener, but it is not their overweening passion that takes up all of their spare time.  That adds up to about 13 million "gardeners" in this country. That leaves something around 45 million homeowners who I call "yardeners", and they can rightfully be called "Home Landscapers". These are folks who do not consider themselves to be gardeners.  At the same time, most of them care about how their landscape looks and are willing to take some time to keep it looking good. I believe that 70% of the money spend in the entire consumer based lawn and garden industry is spent by yardeners, not by gardeners.  That means that roughly 60 to 70% of the people walking into a garden center or into the gardening section of a big box, are yardeners.  I find that most signs in those stores are written for gardeners and most labels on lawn and garden products are written for gardeners. Yardeners do not buy gardening books nor read gardening columns because those info sources don't speak to yardeners for the most part. Yardeners get their information from friends who say they are gardeners, staff at the garden center, local television news broadcasts, and newspaper articles (as opposed to columns).  Yardeners for the most part have money to spend on their landscape but feel they have little time to spend taking care of it.  So they are looking for help in developing "low maintenance" landscapes. Here is the best part - I am firmly convinced that if we can find a way to truly communicate to that huge market of yardeners, they will spend more money because they will have some confidence that they know what they are buying and why.  I believe there could be a 20 to 30% increase in Lawn and Garden revenue in the next five years coming from informed yardeners.  Yardeners offer a valid market for information that is not being addressed very much at the moment. Later, Jeff Ball

Here is some background on the material above:

I used a number of approaches to trying to get a more honest number of gardeners than was being broadcast by the National Gardening Association.  Most of this work was done in the mid-90’s, so would need to be updated if someone was trying to publish accurate data for 2004. 

I used a number of statistics and then use logic to get to the gardeners number.

For example, in those days there were about 4 million gardening books sold in the country in one year.  Most serious gardeners I know, buy lots of gardening books every year whether they need them or not.  I assumed then that if there were 12 million gardeners, and only one third bought one book each year, that would cover the 4 million.  Knowing that many people buy more than one book, helps me to be comfortable with that intuitive leap.

I did the same analysis with garden magazine subscriptions.  I think I came up with something like 1.5 to 2.0 million garden magazine subscriptions in the country for all gardening magazines.  I figured that the serious gardeners would be more likely to subscribe to gardening magazines and if one out of three did so, then that put my number of serious gardeners at about 6 million; I think I am in the ballpark.

I know that the estimate of 70 million homeowners with property is low, but that is safer to use.

I also know that the figure for folks paying someone else to take care of their property is a good one because it comes from the National Associations of Landscapers and Lawn Care guys.  It is something between 10 and 12 million, last I checked. 

So that left me with needing to be sure about the figure for gardeners, beyond the book sales and the magazine sales.  Then I came up with a scheme. It took several years, but I feel it is a good rough indicator.  I was a jogger in those years and jogged almost every day no matter where I was in the country, and I did a fair amount of traveling.  So I started jogging in suburban developments – new ones, old ones, etc.  I also jogged in small towns and I drove a lot in the rural country when I could.  What I was doing was actually counting the number gardens I saw for every ten houses I passed.  If someone had some shrubs and some bedding plants I did not count them as a gardener.  They had to have a vegetable garden, a flower bed, or extensive collections of landscape plants to qualify as a gardener.  I did this in New England, Mid Atlantic, Mid West and Deep South over a period of a few years.  In all that time I never saw more than three or four gardeners in every ten houses and usually it was zero or one per ten houses. 

One house in ten with a total of 70 million is 7, 000,000. I believe the average is maybe 2 houses of every ten I saw had gardeners which makes 14 million.  Again it is ballpark.  It suggests my 12 million estimate is more accurate than NGA’s 60 million estimate.  If there were 60 million gardeners in this country there would be 8 gardens in every ten houses in America.  That is nonsense.  I get the vegetable gardeners from my observations, numbers of people buying seeds in the country each year, and some other indicators I have forgotten.  The 2 million vegetable gardener figure is probably high. 

So however you calculate the number of gardeners, it is definitely less than 15 million.  That gets me to my 40 to 45 million yardeners.  I know that is a solid estimate, and is big enough so that it should get the attention of the lawn and garden industry both in manufacturing and in retail – but it does not.  So be it. 

 Let me know if you need any more data.  My phone is 810-724-8581

Jeff