Deborah's Gardening Tour

Welcome to my website where I share my excitement about gardens and garden centers that I have visited.

As a Master Gardener living in Virginia Beach, Virginia I enjoy the fellowship provided by other gardeners in this region blessed with great environment for growing plants.

My fascination with garden centers developed from a class at Tidewater Community College (TCC) in Chesapeake, Virginia. We were required to critique local garden centers, taking into account various aspects of operating this type of business: sales and marketing, customer retention and growth, product mix, and so forth.  Curiously, my current occupation in customer service and sales for a major insurance company provided me with some helpful insights into the essential facets of business operation. Combined with my lifelong enjoyment of gardening, the business aspects of gardening has opened a new dimension of interest for me.

Purpose

Currently I am focusing on my experiences gained during a recent vacation to the Midland region of Britain. My husband and I spent two weeks visiting our daughter in Manchester, which served as the base for our daily excursions to gardens and centers in that area.

One of primary purposes for doing this project is to continue learning about garden centers as businesses that fulfill, to some extent other, a need for the local gardeners that they serve. I also want to share my knowledge and excitement with others who may also find this information worthwhile. This may be include other students who are taking classes on these subjects or those who wish to prepare themselves for a career in this field.

Method

For each garden center that I critique on this site, I have used the same method that I utilized in the Nursery and Garden Center Management class that I took at TCC.  The bulleted items under each heading are the sorts of things that make or break a business, especially in the very competitive field of gardening centers.  Students should find this highly structured method helpful, especially if they are taking the same class that I took.  (HOVER HERE for Method details.)

One of the limitations of my brief survey of gardens and centers is accessibility by the public transportation system. We utilized an eight-day Britrail train pass combined with frequent bus rides and walks to get to each facility. If we had used an automobile, the list would probably have been different, because we passed on a couple of nice-looking garden centers simply because the cab fare would have been excessive for our purposes.

Since all of the centers that I visited have websites with travel directions, hours of operation, etc., I will not be repeating that information for each site.

Photos

Photos provide graphic documentation of my tour. You can view some of the best in the Flash slideshow at the top right of each page.  Visit the Photo Archive for the full photo collection that includes a couple of sections on some lovely plant displays (Containers and Home Gardens) not covered in the written reviews.

Acknowledgements

I want to thank the numerous people who provided much needed direction and assistance on our travels. The British people were so friendly and helpful, making our travels so much more enjoyable and efficient. Francis Davenport and her husband John of Holehird gardens were particularly supportive during our day trip to that amazing center.

Also, much thanks to my husband David for his assistance with travel arrangements, photography, and web design.

Contact Information

If you wish to provide feedback or ask questions, email me at: debbieknit@cox.net

The format and structure of my critiques of the various garden centers include the following categories with parenthetical descriptions:

  • Structure (physical building and related structures)
  • Access (easy to find, easy to get to, how to get to, disabled)
  • Traffic Flow (interior layout)
  • Appearance (condition, new or old, clean or dirty, attractive or ugly)
  • Environment (music, shopping environment, ambiance, color, floor covering)
  • Seasonal Merchandise (Christmas, Halloween, Easter, etc)
  • Structures (conservatories, working greenhouses, garden sheds, etc)
  • Landscaping/Hardscaping (pavers, concrete blocks, fencing, etc)
  • Stoneware (pots, statues, garden ornaments, sundials, birdbaths, etc)