Marketing firms must love plant-obsessed gardeners

If you ever wanted to know just how single-minded gardeners are, take a look in your mailbox. It’s filled with catalogs suggesting the perfect gifts to buy for everyone on your list, fancy dishes to set the perfect holiday table and last minute decorations for a festive house.

And, if you’re a gardener, seed catalogs.

The marketing model for December is well established — push what you can sell for the holidays and everything else waits until January. Only the plant business has the confidence to completely ignore that long-standing practice.

And that’s because they can. They know that gardeners are ready to talk about, think about and spend on gardening at any time of the year.

The proof is not just in the seed catalogs that show up weekly. Online plant suppliers open up sales for sought after plants like dahlias and special cannas in December and January.

One popular plant brand is working hard to create a new shopping holiday with something they call Green Monday (it was Dec. 11)  — a one-day sale of every plant they sell online, with delivery coming for next year’s garden.

I can just imagine the marketing department for any other aspect of retail sales seeing this Green Monday strategy and laughing. “Who would buy a bunch of stuff they won’t get until spring in the middle of the biggest holiday shopping week?”

Gardeners, that’s who. And not only do they buy, they share what they buy with other gardeners online and then other gardeners go and buy more.

It’s not just about buying. Several new All-America Selections winners were just announced. Plants that achieve that status, which is bestowed by the nonprofit group of the same name, are tested in more than 80 trial gardens around North America and deemed to be the best available plant in a specific category.

The latest winners include Purple Magic broccoli, Burning Embers Celosia and a geranium called Big EEZE Pink Batik, among others.

Few organizations would be so bold as to send out a press release in the weeks before Christmas and expect to get any coverage, but don’t tell that to the folks at All-America Selections. Because in addition to lists of what they bought on Green Monday, do you know what a lot of gardeners are talking about? Purple broccoli that tastes good.

Gardeners defy all the norms of marketing strategy, but that’s what happens when a hobby becomes a part of your personality.

In other words, regardless of what else is going on, gardeners are always thinking a little bit about plants. Maybe that’s why we tend to be optimists, because if you have faith that sticking a seed in the ground will produce dinner months later, then how negative can you get when plants take up a permanent spot in your brain?

So while a lot of people are focused only on what happens between now and Jan. 1, gardeners are way ahead of them, thinking about next summer. And it all starts with that seed catalog sitting in the mailbox right now, and perhaps a hunt for a great variety of purple broccoli.