Gearing up for the new season
From pets to pollinator-friendly plants, garden centers are busy planning for the 2026 season. Here are some of the ways three retailers (and one consultant) are shaping up their stores for the new year.
Lawn & Garden Retailer: Are you planning any new events for 2026?
Erik Friedli, buyer at Flamingo Road Nursery in Davie, Florida, and partner at Garden Center Consultants: As a consultant, I stress the importance of events to garden centers as a way to expand their audience and add to the experience. Fall events are the best way to do this, and the most profitable. Other events that work great are weekends centered around butterflies, vegetable growing and general spring celebrations.
At Flamingo, we added a few events centered around pets. Plant people are often pet people, so it is a natural fit.
Jake Scott, garden center manager at Piedmont Feed & Garden Center in Chapel Hill, North Carolina: We do not have any new events in the works for 2026, at this time. Sadly, attendance at our workshops and classes in 2025 slowly declined compared to ’24 and ’23. We have heard from customers and observed that there are so many events and things going on that we are competing for people’s time. The post-COVID life has fully returned, and it’s getting harder and harder to win the time of customers.
One thing we are going to do differently is try hosting classes after hours on weekdays. We feel the weekend is jam-packed for folks, and we want to see if the after-work relax-and-learn sessions will be a bigger draw. If the first few do not gain much traction, we can always return to weekend sessions.
Kate Terrell, president of Wallace’s Garden Center in Bettendorf, Iowa: We are! We are building an addition onto our greenhouse (after the fire burned it down) and will be doing a ribbon cutting with the Chamber of Commerce. We are hosting another Chamber of Commerce event in May, a coffee meetup where we provide coffee and light breakfast for chamber members from 7:30-9 a.m., and they come to network, visit with friends and get their caffeine for the day. We have started booking for classes and workshops with private groups like garden clubs, women’s outdoor clubs and ladies’ social groups. We are increasing partnerships with local food trucks and looking at collaborating with other local businesses like a candle maker and a statuary company that makes garden sculptures.
L&GR: What investments do you plan to make in your operations in 2026?
Friedli: Investments in paving are the best I can recommend. Being able to pallet jack material from one area to another or run vendor carts is game-changing. Plus, it makes the garden center friendlier toward women in heels and people with mobility challenges.
Scott: We are planning to do some interior display and structural improvements going into the 2026 season. We are reworking some of our store layout to put better performing departments, like pet, more prominent in the customer’s path. We know that most plant lovers are pet owners, and we want to increase our impulse buying of the pet department, while moving other departments that we know customers will always find into areas of the floor that have less impulse traffic.
In gift, we are redoing one of our exterior building walls to make angled walls that can allow us to improve on the “rooms” of the gift department. It’s sometimes hard to transition between themes right next to each other, and this will allow us to have some structural changes so that these changes feel more intentional.
Terrell: The structure fire we had in May changed our plans for investment. We are rebuilding our fire-affected areas with a much nicer greenhouse from Prospiant. We will improve the retail experience in the greenhouse and the efficiency and safety of our production area. We are looking at investing in all new nursery tables (aluminum and steel) for our nursery area.
L&GR: What new products or product categories do you plan to sell in 2026 that you didn’t sell in 2025?
Friedli: I plan on expanding offerings of native perennials. In the past, I have offered a bit here and there but always failed. This go-around, I plan on expanding my selection. You gotta be in it to win it!
Scott: In late 2024, we added a Bulk Bar to our offerings, and this year we have really seen this department take off. Garden center customers are aware of the less need for plastics and landfill waste and by offering bulk health and beauty products such as shampoos, soaps, deodorant, laundry powder, etc.; we are doing a small part to eliminate some of that waste. So in 2026, we plan to continue to grow in this department by adding some additional products that customers have requested and leaning more into sustainable gifts and offerings.
With the challenge of tariffs, we plan to continue to source gifts and hardgoods as locally as we can. For example, all of our wrought iron products are made in North Carolina by Border Concepts, our candles are made one town over in Hillsborough, and our bar and hand soaps are made in Raleigh. So we are focusing on finding locally made products to offer our customers without having to make a hard financial investment in products we are known to provide them.
Terrell: We are going to pull back to our core a little bit and really focus on plants and pots and garden related items. We are going to scale back or eliminate some other categories like women’s clothing and kitchen tools and accessories. We are looking for vendors that are made in the U.S. or reasonably priced despite tariff pressure. We plan to buy more garden accessories like stakes, chimes, bird baths and cast stone statuary. We plan to buy a little short and refresh with new product throughout the year. Pollinator-related items are still very popular so we will look to add some more pollinator items.
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