Younger homeowners seek low-maintenance landscapes

With four kids ages 8 months to 8 years, Matt and Richelle Pedersen want their Birmingham, Mich., backyard to be functional and easy to maintain.

Matt calls it user-friendly: It is a big grassy play area that has plants that bloom in succession all season without requiring much attention.

“This is a Swiffer yard,” laughs Matt, a 36-year-old bond broker. “We didn’t want anything that’s going to require a lot of work but will look nice.”

Just as they have embraced the Swiffer, Proctor & Gamble’s hit line of floor mops and dusters with disposable dirt pads, more and more homeowners under 40 want nice lawns and gardens without all the hard work that goes into them — even if that means spending more money.

Often influenced by cable TV landscaping shows, these consumers show a preference for attractive yards — occasionally with flourishes like outdoor kitchens and sound systems — to enjoy and entertain, not primarily to pursue the hobby of gardening.

“My focus was more on a place where we could hang out than a collection of plants,” says Jonathon Hofley, 33, who with his brother Eric publishes and edits the Michigan Gardener magazine.

Researchers say it reflects the group’s hectic lives and desire for predictable outcomes when it comes to tasks like feeding the grass.

Marketers and retailers are listening. Any change in consumer preferences affects what shoppers find at garden centers, from the size of plants available to options for applying fertilizer.

Last year Americans spent $35.2 billion on lawn and garden products and about that much on landscape services, according to the National Gardening Association.

High school teacher Elaine Jirkans, 33, and her husband, Andy Malone, 34, a design engineer, garden for the love of it. They grow vegetables, herbs and flowers and enjoy showing them to friends who visit their Detroit home.

But Elaine says they aren’t obsessive.

“We’re not meticulous in terms of pulling weeds and making sure the grass is perfectly cut, but we want it to look neat and green.”

When Hofley and his wife Celeste, a 31-year-old ad agency art director, have friends visit them in Birmingham, Mich., the pergola he built is a backyard magnet.

He installed the landscape and does the yard work himself, although he says he’s not that interested in memorizing individual plant characteristics or learning a bunch of Latin names.

He’s more interested in having a nice place to relax and entertain with Celeste, often under the pergola.

“She and I will eat out there. We do entertaining underneath it,” he says. “That’s our home central in summer for parties.”

He says most of his friends are not into plants, but they appreciate the yard’s green privacy, colorful flowers and ornamental grasses.

“My goal has been to find plants that are relatively low maintenance, that don’t need a ton of watering,” Hofley explains.

Jennifer Stansberry, marketing manager at English Gardens stores, said she senses that among many younger homeowners.

“Gardening is not their main hobby. They’re creating the outdoor living room,” she says.

Vickie Abrahamson, executive vice-president and co founder of Iconoculture in Minneapolis, said her firm has tracked similar trends.

“They just love the casual lifestyle. They’re not buying furniture for their dining room. They’re buying the outdoor grill, firepit, the comfy chairs to become the central focal point,” she says.

Consumer spending on do-it-yourself lawn and garden products peaked in 2002 at $39.6 billion and has fallen annually since then, according to Bruce Butterfield, research director of the National Gardening Association in Burlington, Vt.

What has grown over the same period is the amount spent on hired services. Butterfield says that is now about the same as the total spent on DIY, with one in three households hiring lawn or garden assistance.

Scott Pittman, a landscape architect who owns Garden Central in Berkley, Mich., says cable landscaping shows have been great for getting homeowners more interested in landscaping, although he’s sometimes called to fix TV-inspired projects that bombed.

Pittman says his younger landscape design customers are interested in their landscape’s big picture: They want it to look right, to look “done,” although “I’m not so sure they’re so passionate about plants. But later on in life, they might be.”

The Pedersens hired Jim Morris of English Gardens to design the landscape around their newly built house when they moved in 1 1/2 years ago.

A 33-year-old homemaker, Richelle says she admires her in-laws’ extensive plantings, greenhouse and pond but those features don’t fit into her current lifestyle.

“I just don’t have time to sit down and learn about the plants,” she says. She likes color and favors perennials because they return year after year but, overall, “I’d rather spend the time with my kids than gardening.”

And if the kids trample something, it’s not the tragedy it would be in a more highly manicured setting.

“Here, we don’t worry about it,” he says.