Retail Revival: Overstocking on old-school plants

A few years ago in the week after Memorial Day I walked through a local garden center and saw hundreds of pots of Pelargoniums.

These window-box favorites, commonly called geraniums or zonal geraniums, were the must-have annual 20 or 25 ago. Today? Not so much.

When I first started working at my IGC, these annuals were a common component for containers and window boxes. Customers would come in asking for “geraniums, spikes and vinca.” The geraniums were the Pelargoniums, the spikes were the Dracaena indivisa that were put for upright interest in the middle and the vinca was variegated Vinca major, which was the trailing component.

These annuals were so popular that there was an entire hoop house devoted to 4-inch pots of geraniums, and we ran a special 4-pack geranium sale at the end of April which filled another greenhouse.

Now, more than 25 years later, I marvel at how far we’ve come. Yes, there are still customers who want Pelargoniums, but there are so many other annuals available that these are no longer the dominant summer container plant.

Styles in planting change from generation to generation as well, and today’s younger gardeners like to experiment.

In the 20th century, annuals were planted low to high, often in straight lines. It was typical to plant bedding annuals with a row of short plants in the front, medium height in the middle and tall in the back. Stair-step plantings were also common in window boxes and pots.

Going into the 21st century, as the palette of plants has expanded, the public became comfortable with the “thriller, filler and spiller” method. Yet even that recipe has become less important as younger gardeners embrace unusual plants, tropicals, grasses and new varieties.

© C.L. Fornari

Garden design for in-ground annuals has also evolved. Just as perennial beds are often being planted in field or meadow style, so too are annuals placed with varying heights and colors of plants growing all together in a community instead of a height-determined arrangement. The latest version of this is being called chaos gardening, which involves throwing seeds randomly on tilled soil without a plan or attempt at control.

Containers and window boxes are being planted field-style as well, many including grasses and random foliage plants. As it happens in the natural world, the plants are left to find their place in the container, with the nature of the plant and their ability to compete determining which ones become thrillers, fillers or spillers.

Younger gardeners are also more interested in having their purchases do more than just please themselves. Bombas, a popular sock company, attracts customers because every pair that they sell prompts a donation of socks to shelters for the unhoused. The pet food delivery company Chewy donates food to animal rescue networks.

Consumers like supporting products that give back or do more for the good of the world at large. When shopping for plants, our customers are also interested in having their gardens give to the environment or serve double duty.

They look for annuals that support pollinators, birds and other wildlife. They like using native plants as often as possible, or they want to include edible plants in their gardens and containers. Consider a “plants with purpose” section of annuals or perennials that feed the natural world or the gardener’s family.

Styles are always changing, and your IGC’s buying needs to acknowledge those changes. In preparing for future orders, it can be helpful to spend some time on TikTok, Reddit, Instagram and Facebook, looking at the pictures that people post of their gardens and containers.

Look at local garden groups on Facebook or plant and container threads on Reddit, and notice what people are sharing. Search with the hashtags #containergardening, #annuals, #gardeninglife, #gardeningideas, #instagardeners and #windowbox to see what plants and planting styles are popular.

You’ll still want to order Pelargoniums, but you just might decide that until this plant becomes trendy once again, that part of the geranium shelf space might be devoted to other selections.