The 2023 Garden Trends Report, with Katie Dubow
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Hi, guys!
It seems nearly impossible that we are more than three-quarters of the way through 2022, and yet here we are.
This is the time of year when I start focusing on my next garden: What mistakes will I not repeat (feeding squirrels near my tomatoes), what successes did I have (grow-bag potato harvest, hydrangeas, self-watering window boxes), what spring bulbs will I plant (probably only garlic this year) and what will I add to my beds in spring (working on that list now).
And I’m not alone. The folks at Garden Media Group, a green-industry PR company based in Kennett Square, Penn., have been looking ahead to the coming year and publishing their annual Garden Trends Report since 2001.
I had an eye-opening conversation with GMG’s president, Katie Dubow, last week, during which she shared her 2023 predictions and the methodology used to come up with them.
According to Katie, GMG only missed one trend in the past two decades: Fairy gardens. I can’t say I saw that one coming, either.
JESSICA: I’ve been getting your Garden Trends Report for nearly 20 years, so it’s nice to talk with you finally.
KATIE: Yes! Same here. I thought we would have met along the way.
JESSICA: Right? So tell me a little bit about Garden Media Group.
KATIE: My mom [Suzi McCoy] started the company in our basement 35 years ago when she put me on the bus to Kindergarten. At the time, there were a lot of problems in the mushroom industry—gangs, violence—and she helped turn that reputation around. Then [The horticultural products company] Conard-Pyle saw her work with the mushroom industry, and they hired her to help launch the first Knockout rose. I started working for her when I was 6, licking envelopes, and officially took over as president in 2020.
JESSICA: What inspired the first Garden Trends Report?
KATIE: In 2001, the Philadelphia Flower Show was a client of my mom’s, and that year’s show theme was France. She asked them, ‘how did you pick France?’ They looked at her like she had six heads!
JESSICA: It was just a random choice?
KATIE: Exactly. So she started the report, and the biggest trend that year was France! That’s how the report was born. It was created through that show, and the rest is history.
JESSICA: I’m very curious about the process. How do you decide what will be a trend?
KATIE: I just created a 2024 trends folder. I collect things we’re seeing all through the year. We talk to our friends in Europe because that’s where everything starts. We talk to growers and find out what they’re going to be growing. And they often work 10 years out, so I want to know what they are seeing in that arena. We talk to landscape designers. We mostly work one or two levels higher than the store level, so the report is really popular with retailers. I like to think of it as an inverted pyramid: Trends affecting the world and trickling to our industry.
JESSICA: You mentioned missing the fairy gardens trend. What was the biggest trend you predicted?
KATIE: Native plants! Back in 2006, we were starting to work with the American Beauties program put on by North Creek, a grower in our area. It was just getting started then, so that was a prediction. Every year, we talk about natives [in the report], but in different ways. We really knocked it out of the park with that one really early on.
Another was in 2018, when we talked about our desire to form an intrinsic connection with nature. We saw people doing forest bathing and earthing, which is when you go outside without shoes on. And the pandemic accelerated it further.
JESSICA: I’m really interested in learning the specifics of what you’re predicting for 2023. And why.
KATIE: The first trend is what we call “The Tesla Effect.” That’s technology. There are some video games, but virtual reality, augmented reality and artificial intelligence are not quite yet touching gardening. But we are seeing more tech coming into the space. How that’s relevant to our industry, of course, is that we need to be aware that this is new.
There have been 18 million new gardeners over the pandemic, and the majority of those are digital natives [younger gardeners who grew up using technology]. [They want things like] the Tertill electronic weeding device that will help make life easier and make them more successful.
We need more tech products, and we see a big drive for those changes. Not just robotics; we’re seeing more and more garden apps, and they make it easier. There’s an app called From Seed to Spoon by Park Seed that lets you track when you planted seeds, when to harvest, when to water and has recipes. Plus, you can buy seeds.
Arizona is offering vouchers [to residents] to switch to electric lawn equipment, and California will ban gas-powered mowers by 2024. So we’re seeing a trend moving away from gas-powered equipment toward electric and battery-operated products.
Next is the “Backdoor Revolution.” This came from a garden retailer in Portland. Have you been following what’s going on in the west? There’s a huge homeless problem.
Housing prices are too expensive, and that’s pushing millennials out of their first home-buying season, which is our industry’s prime time to capture them as a customer. The National Association of Realtors doesn’t expect first-time home buying to return to normal until 2030.
In the west, they’re using accessory dwellings, which look like great little sheds or garages and enable people to live in nice neighborhoods with access to good schools and jobs and not pay astronomical rents.
JESSICA: How does that translate into a gardening trend?
KATIE: So the landscaping needs have changed. They don’t have an acre; they have a little plot of land, so privacy is key. People are really into creating beautiful places that are private. When retailers are at a [trade] show, they look at new ways for people to grow UP – things like green walls and small-space container design. And there are awesome smaller plants that growers are creating to react to those needs. Have you heard of the Petite Knockout?
JESSICA: Yes, I had one this year, but I killed it. That was completely on me. My negligence. I left it in its pot, got busy, and never got around to planting it. Or watering it. That was disappointing.
KATIE: That happens. It’s a great plant. And it works in a container.
JESSICA: I see you’ve identified Accessible Gardening as a trend. What’s driving that?
KATIE: There’s a trendspotter named Faith Popcorn, who does very macro global trends. She coined the term “Super Agers.” They are the boomer generation, who are going to live way past their 80s but with brain power that’s 30 years younger. Everyone is focused on millennials and, now, Gen Z, but we want to make sure we remember the tried and traditional gardeners, the Boomers.
Maybe they don’t have a garden anymore. They might be in a smaller space, and their needs may have changed, but they are still a very relevant customer. They need lighter-weight pots. Soil even comes in tiny little bricks, and you just add water.
JESSICA: Yes, I love those. And I’m not even a Boomer. (Adding a link for anyone interested).
KATIE: Also, there’s the rise of the landscape coach. Boomers used designers in the past, they gardened for 40 years, but maybe they changed zones and need help understating plants in their new area. We encourage growers and retailers to have a plant coach.
JESSICA: We’ve all heard of TikTok, and I’m seeing “PlantTok” on the trends report. Tell me about that.
KATIE: This is the last one that was added to the list, and I was the pushback here. I was not on TikTok. I was the holdout.
Social media can overwhelm B2B companies. They’re still contemplating Facebook.
TikTok is not just for dance and not just for young people. You don’t have to be on TikTok to see TikTok. You may have been texted a TikTok and not even know it. My mom sends them to me. They show up on Instagram and Facebook, so a garden brand needs to know their customer is there. There’s a huge group of people talking about plants there already.
So the plants are there, and the customers are there. As a green industry, we can’t ignore the platform anymore.
JESSICA: So you mean the hashtag?
KATIE: Yes, it’s a hashtag. And there are three other trends within it: There’s Gnomecore, which is people who live gnome lifestyles on TikTok -- cozy aesthetics, plants surrounding them, mushroom décor and wildlife friends. There are hundreds of thousands of people sharing.
The second is WitchTok, and that’s also a hashtag that’s been shared over 19 billion times. People are living a witchy lifestyle, and all of them are incorporating plants. They’re growing herbs for healing, all involving plants. It’s cool to see people can be themselves by way of plants.
And the last one is moon gardens. In our industry, we think we’ve seen that before, but Google trends says moon gardens won’t peak until mid-2023. So the use of white plants, the Old Farmer’s Almanac predictions. It’s nothing new, but TikTok is giving them new life.
JESSICA: And Greek gardens? Millennials are embracing ornate Corinthian accents and statues and boxwood hedges? I was surprised to see that since minimalistic mid-century modern has been a trend for so long.
KATIE: Yes. The Greek trend includes gravel garden design with drought tolerant plants and planting natives in there, but you’ll really see in the near future, more people will be using gravel gardens for style and also for climate change. There’s an environmental purpose.
JESSICA: What is “Redrawing the Map?”
KATIE: That’s my favorite trend. It’s also the most resonating with most groups. The USDA is changing zones, and the climate is warming northward. What are we going to do about it?
Trees are one of the answers to fighting climate change, and a researcher from Davey Tree, Dr. Daniel Herms, compiled a list of trees for the future.
Trees that we’re planting today will be around for 100 years, so if trees are one of the solutions, we need to be sure we’re planting climate-resilient trees.
JESSICA: I see color on the report. We all know about Pantone and the fashion industry’s so-called “colors of the year,” but how did your color prediction come about?
KATIE: This is a fun one because we predicted purple, and then Pantone came out with eggplant. When we predicted green, every paint color also came out with greens. This is truly fun for us.
This year, we discovered it was earth tones, all the way. Beiges, creams. We landed on terracotta, and when I gave this presentation at our trade show, Cultivate, people just oohed and aahed, which is not typical.
Think not just of pots but certain plants, like red sombrero coneflower.
JESSICA: I have that one. It’s lovely.
KATIE: Yes, and there’s a Coppertop viburnum. When you deadhead it, new growth comes back in a beautiful terracotta. But we are also looking at fun brands like LBE Designs, which makes sustainably produced, more modern pots.
👏 Sunday shoutout
Nick Ranieri of Commack, NY, the subject of my two-time award-winning 2021 Newsday article titled, “Growing a place in history,” checked in recently to report his garden was doing great this year. And he sent along a few photos to prove it.
One of those photos shows Ranieri, who was honored by the Smithsonian Institution for his time-honored gardening methods, standing by one of his impeccably pruned, quasi-espaliered, 9-foot-tall tomato plants — indeed a thing of beauty!
You can read the article here to learn why and how Ranieri was installed into the Archive of American Gardens.
💡 If you do one thing this week…
Trim away dead or broken tree branches to protect against danger to people and damage to property from hurricanes, tropical storms and — looking ahead in colder climates — Nor’easters and other windy winter tempests.
📰This week in my Associated Press gardening column
I write a weekly gardening column for the AP, so you might have seen my byline in your local paper (or news website) — wherever in the world you happen to be. In case you miss it, though, I’ll post the most recent here every week.
This week, I wrote about how to care for houseplants as fall approaches.
As fall gets started, gardeners focus on enjoying the last of the season’s flowers and harvests, clearing away spent plants and planning next year’s garden.
But indoor plants need attention now, too. Houseplants that spent the season outside need a proper transition back indoors to avoid shock. And they may have other concerns to address, as well. Plants that have stayed indoors all summer have changing needs, too, as the days get shorter.
Before that, I covered topics such as harvesting and saving vegetable seeds for next year, dealing with stressed lawns, when and how to harvest potatoes, attracting birds to your garden and saving Monarch butterflies.
You can read all my AP gardening columns here.
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📧 How’m I doing?
I welcome your comments and suggestions, so please send them along — as well as any topics you’d like to see covered and questions you’d like answered in the Ask Jessica section.
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