Design tool reveals consumer habits and preferences

Burpee Home Gardens new mobile design tool, “My Garden Designer,” created more than 3,000 mixed container recipes for home gardeners in the first month of its spring 2012 launch and revealed gardening habits, color choices and preferences. The tool helps consumers create “thriller, filler, spiller” arrangements for patio, containers or garden beds, and also creates a plant shopping list, a where-to-buy store search, and suggests designs and arrangement styles.

This spring, 50 percent of gardeners used the tool for garden bed combinations, while the other half used it for container/basket combinations. The tool also showed that 75 percent of gardeners created combination recipes for sun location and 25 percent for shade.

Large garden beds still seem to be a popular project, taking the largest share of the overall recipes. For planting in garden beds, areas greater than 6 feet received the most choices at 56 percent, followed by areas between 4 and 6 feet at 29 percent, and 2- to 4-foot areas at 15 percent. In containers, a mid-size container is the most prevalent at 52 percent followed by large at 31 percent and then small at 17 percent.  

My Garden Designer also offers a glimpse of consumers’ color preferences. Within “fillers” there is a big diversity of color, with purple gaining the most use at 24 percent. Neutral-based colors were popular for “spillers,” with silver leading the way at 31 percent of the top selections. And for garden “thrillers,” traditional garden colors were favored, with red being the most popular at 25 percent.

For more information on Burpee Home Gardens’ mobile tools, visit www.burpeeretailideacenter.com. To learn more about the Burpee Home Gardens program through Ball Horticultural Co., visit www.ballhort.com/burpeehomegardens.