Have you noticed that shopping for plants has changed? Gone are the tiny little tags with no useable information stuck in equally tiny pots or pony packs. Instead, there are larger pots and plants labeled with large, colorful tags with great pictures and all the growing information you could hope for.

Jim Alice, owner of Liberty Park Florist and Greenhouse, loves the new system because it helps his customers refine their choices. “We are a very visual society and people love labels and tags. It’s great. You have a tag that shows you what (the plant) is, what color it is, where it should be planted, what kind of conditions it needs. It saves me a lot of time trying to explain every little detail.”

Alice and retail nursery people around the world have joined the latest trend in the horticultural industry: marketing branded plants. Names like Proven Winners, Flower Fields, Monrovia and Terra Nova among dozens are appearing on more and more plants throughout the retail market.

Plant branding and marketing has been going on since the first nursery offered catalogs of their seeds a couple of hundred years ago. Think Burpee Seeds or Jackson and Perkins roses here. Individual nurseries and specialty growers promoted their own particular plants and varieties to the American public. There just wasn’t much collaboration between them to jointly market a plant.

What collaboration there was often consisted of the promotion of the best of a new year’s varieties through independent organizations such as the All-America Selections and the All-America Rose Selections. Since 1932, the All-America Selections has independently tested new varieties of vegetables and flowers and then labeled the best of the best as All-America Selections. The All-America Rose Selections has been doing the same for roses since 1938.

In the last 15 to 20 years though, the horticulture industry has changed from a regional or national industry to a global one with many more growers and breeders seeking the attention of retail growers and eventually the individual consumer.

The ability to ship perishable live plants anywhere in the world almost overnight has eliminated geography as a hurdle to growing and selling plants. The bedding plants you bought last summer at the local nursery may have started life in Asia or South America where growing conditions are more stable and labor is cheap.

The development of biotechnology and the techniques of tissue culture, cloning and other genetic level manipulation shaved years off the process of developing new varieties. One new variety could yield thousands of daughter plants in a year’s time instead of the decades it used to take. As a result, so many new varieties are hitting the market so fast that the average retail nursery can not possibly know about or carry even a fraction of the offerings.

Enter the new marketing and branding efforts. To bring order out of chaos, many growers started banding together to market their plants under brands such as Proven Winners and Flower Fields or created their own brand like Monrovia and Terra Nova.

Through market research, they identified what the public wanted in their plants and grew the plants to those specifications. They put together colorful advertising campaigns in gardening magazines and sponsored gardening and home improvement TV programming to create customer awareness. They developed lines of potting soils and fertilizers and colorful marketing materials for the retailer to help them connect to the customer.

Tonya Lehner, marketing director for Western Horticultural Products, said that “There has been more and more advertising in consumer magazines. As a result, the customer comes in asking for the plant. Wehop can give the retailers a heads up that there are going to be ads for a particular plant. The retailer can have the product when the customer comes in.” Wehop is a horticultural broker who brings together Northwest retail growers like Alice with more than 70 wholesale growers including the new marketing groups.

For Alice and other growers, this takes some of the guesswork out of selecting what he grows and sells to his customers. With the marketing programs, he is able to combine his family’s decades of experience growing plants in the Spokane market with the expertise of the marketing programs to come up with the best new plants that will do well in our climate

Alice says of his test program; “My job is to figure out which one of these growers has the best one for our climate. There are certain varieties of the Proven Winners that I like and certain varieties of the D and E (First Class) that I like. I grow them side-by-side and pick the best for my customers.”

Alice feels that the new high-profile marketing promotions of plants raises awareness in the market and takes the consumers’ knowledge to a higher level than without them.

They both feel this approach can make even the novice gardener’s efforts look like they had a professional’s touch.

Lehner has a few words of caution for gardeners who fall in love with a particular plant or planting combination they might find in a magazine. “If your garden center doesn’t have the exact plant (from the ad), trust your garden center to find something similar and maybe even better.”