These wholesale plant sources help to reveal the trends within the industry before those trends make their way to retail outlets.
There is a particular kind of intelligence that exists in the wholesale plant trade, one that most people outside the trade do not experience and that the people within the trade often take for granted. Wholesale plant nurseries see what plants are being ordered before they are planted, what plants are being planted before they are photographed for the magazines and websites that publish these plants, and what plants are being talked about before they reach the garden centres, interior design magazines, and the Instagram accounts that most people believe are the origins of plant trends.
They don’t begin there, though. They begin in the order books.
If a species or variety of plant starts appearing in wholesale orders with increasing frequency, then that shows that the design community is shifting in its thinking regarding the use of plants in landscaping. The plant has been seen somewhere by someone whose opinion is respected within the design community, and that enthusiasm has begun to translate into the purchasing of those plants before the general retail customers are even aware of their existence.
The ornamental grasses that dominated retail stores for a decade were ordered by wholesalers years prior to that. The movement towards native species was also visible in wholesaler orders before the popularisation of the concept of rewilding. Today’s interest in structural plants that perform throughout the year, rather than just seasonally, is visible in wholesaler orders even though these types of plants are not yet popular among individual gardeners.
The lead time between the specification of a plant and the plant reaching retail visibility is long. The field architect specifies a plant for the field design project. The project is constructed over months or years. The finished field is photographed and published. Those photographs influence other field architects. Garden centres respond to retail demand. The wholesale trade in plants supplies the plant for years prior to its peak retail visibility. For Wholesale Plants, contact //www.palmstead.co.uk/wholesale-plants-for-trade-in-kent
The nurseries that take note of the order patterns of the plants that they grow have an advantage in growing decisions that is unmatched by any amount of retail market research.
Growing a plant takes time that trend forecasting doesn’t account for.
The wholesale trade has the lead time to be ready for the products that they will see eighteen months before they arrive.
And the buyers who pay attention to what their nursery is growing – not just what it now has in stock – are reading the most reliable field trend report available.
