Six Tips for Displaying your Landscaping Plants
Here are six tips on how to best display and sell individual bedding plants in popular groupings. You can market these plants (that are popular for landscaping) in your commercial greenhouse by showing and offering them to your customers in pre-designed combinations.
Tip #1 Use Your Landscaping as a Display
Landscape your street-facing sign and any other outdoor beds around your building in ways that homeowners can replicate in the borders and beds around their houses.
Greenhouses succeed at selling bedding plants by inspiring customers with various examples of how to use those plants. Rather than simply telling your customers to envision certain plants together, show them how well different combinations succeed together (both visually and by growth habit) by using your landscaping as a sample garden.
You already offer quality products and knowledgable, friendly customer service; visually inspiring your customers will keep them excited about involving your greenhouse in their landscaping pursuits.
You might create a landscape with a few color varieties each of Lantana, Ipomoea, Coleus, and Angelonia. Pair the varieties that work well together, and you’ll have a bed with three or four sample border combinations.
Tip #2 Pair Plants with Similar Needs
Be sure that the plants you are offering together all need similar light, water, and soil conditions. You wouldn’t plant a landscape border in full sun with two plants that need partial shade or some plants that need extremely dry soil and others that continuously need moist soil.
Lantana, Ipomoea, Coleus, and Angelonia are a great example of plants with matching needs — similar pH, well-drained soil, full sun, warm temperatures, and moderate water.
Tip #3 Have Extras On Hand
Order enough of each plant in the border combination. If you know that one part of the combo is particularly popular on its own, you may need more liners than usual.
If you typically order less of a variety that you’re going to push by creating landscape sample beds, you may need more to help customers repeat those borders at home.
Be sure to have enough on hand to be able to sell your customers not just the individual plants but the landscape experience you’ve planned and created to inspire them.
Tip #4 Create Different Combination Options
Have different options for different personalities and needs. You’ll want to offer border combinations that are low-maintenance, like Perovskia, Phlox, and Gaillardia, as well as landscapes with intense color and instant gratification.
Talk with your customers to see what works best for them, how much time they want to spend on caring for their landscape borders, and what style best suits their taste and home.
It’s ideal to have various pairings and color varieties of easy-care combinations as a go-to suggestion for any customer. The combination suggestion in Tip #1 offers many color varieties and suits customers who prefer groundcover and foliage as well as flowering plants or trailing container plants.
Lantana, Ipomoea, Coleus, and Angelonia can offer a bright, visually intriguing, container-friendly landscape option that is well suited to pop in a suburban subdivision or an architecturally complex city house. You should have a traditional combination suggestion in mind as well.
Tip #5 Create Seasonal Switch-Outs
Be sure to have a second batch of options available as the spring ends and summer heat begins. Have this growing in spring so that you can point people to it as an option for later. Thinking ahead will help your customers plan for each season.
You may change out only one or two plants in a landscape as seasons shift and blooming ends for some flowers. Many foliage plants or flowering plants with a long bloom season can remain as staples for your borders as well as your customers.
It’s much easier to suggest replacing one or two spent varieties for a new season than to convince a customer to replant an entire landscape.
Tip #6 Offer Coordinating Containers
Offer planter pots available to match some of your landscape offerings. This allows customers to have porch containers that coordinate with their landscape beds. It also allows customers with little or no landscape space to enjoy the landscape inspiration in its container version!
Lantana, Ipomoea, Coleus, and Angelonia are especially well suited for planting in large containers or hanging baskets.
Ipomoea’s trailing habit creates a wonderful cascading element over the edge of a container, and Lantana comes in trailing or upright varieties. Try Angelonia as a tall centerpiece, with mid-size Coleus foliage and trailing Ipomoea and Lantana for a stunning container!
