The organizers of the Independent Garden Center Show in Chicago were brave (or foolish) enough to invite all four of us here at GardenRant to come and host a panel discussion to “provide retailers with an honest picture of what a real gardening consumer thinks.”

So here’s your chance. What do you want us to tell a room full of independent garden center owners and employees about what YOU want, expect, like, dislike, in a garden center?

We have only one request.  Speak for YOURSELF.  Don’t tell us what you think OTHER gardeners might want or need.  Frankly, there’s a lot of that going around.  Every retail consultant in the garden center world claims to know what beginning gardeners, urban gardeners, Gen X gardeners, and women gardeners want. But believe it or not, people are coming to this panel to find out what YOU, the Friend of Rant, really thinks!

To that end, here’s another survey.  Take it if you’d like to.  And yes, it’s silly, biased, opinionated, irreverent, and all the things a survey isn’t supposed to be. You’d expect nothing less from GardenRant.

There’s room in the survey to add your comments, but you can also post them here.  What would you tell garden center owners to do differently?  What would your dream garden center look like? And what do you think of the so-called “trends” we’ve listed in the survey? We’ll gather it all up and fire it at the audience in a couple of weeks.

Go here to take the survey.

Because it’s hard to adjust the font size of the survey questions, I’ve reprinted the trends, after the jump, that you’ll see questions about in the survey.

Social networking.  IGCs should be blogging, doing Facebook, Twitter, email newsletters, YouTube videos, etc.

 

Going organic.  IGCs should offer organically-grown plants, and fertilizers/pesticides approved for organic use, exclusively or as much as possible.

 

Going local.  IGCs should offer locally-made and locally-grown plants and products, support local community projects, and generally be a leader in the “buy local” movement.

 

Becoming a green lifestyle center.  IGCs should be about more than gardening—they should be about the “green lifestyle,” from eco-friendly cleaning products to organic sheets to low-VOC paints.

 

Focusing on Edibles.  IGCs should move into edibles in a big way, perhaps including selling hard-to-find heirloom plants and seeds, hosting a farmers market, doing cooking demonstrations, and selling locally-made foods.

 

Outdoor Living.  IGCs should think of gardens as “outdoor rooms” in need of decorating with plants, pots, furniture, and accessories. Gardening should be treated as another type of home and backyard makeover, or a series of projects aimed at improving property values.

 

Organizing the store according to project, not plant type.  Rather than put all the annuals in one place and the one-gallon perennials in another, the plants should be mixed together in vignettes, with different sections focused on container gardening, lawn replacement, flower borders, etc.

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