Word: cataloging
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...siecle, something has changed about what this hobby means to the American middle class -- a change that advertisers, publishers, catalog companies and entrepreneurs are scrambling to exploit. The garden is no longer a private refuge: it is a fashion statement. Far from getting back to nature, the competitive gardener defies it, coercing the most inhospitable climates into growing orchids, coaxing water to run uphill, carving animals in topiary, all for slightly more than it costs to put a child through a year at Harvard. "Louis XIV started small and watched Versailles grow," says power gardener Martha Stewart, who over...
...these intersecting demands -- for instant gardens and exotic ones, for status plants and designer landscapes -- converge to boost the catalog business. The largest seed company, Burpee, alone sent out 6 million catalogs this year, up 20% from last year. Novices can buy a book, Gardening by Mail, just to help them shop. Author Barbara Barton guesses that there are between 1,200 and 1,500 catalogs covering just seeds, plants, bulbs, trees and shrubs, plus an additional 1,000 garden-related catalogs with everything from ornaments and greenhouse kits to clothes and tools...
...have been here before the colonists arrived. Herb gardeners can choose from 10 different kinds of basil, including licorice. Others want to plant "wild gardens" that are designed to provide food for critters. And there are ways to make more critters part of natural dacor: the Sharper Image catalog offers three different sizes of bat houses built of red cedar. The company claims each bat will consume up to 600 mosquitoes an hour; the biggest bat house will accommodate 100 bats. "You might not believe it," says Sharper Image's director of marketing Brian Peck, "but we sell a significant...
Among the best positioned to capitalize on the tastes -- in fact it has probably done the most to invent tastes where they didn't exist before -- is Smith & Hawken, a 16-year-old gardening purveyor that now mails out its catalog to 16 million customers. With a name reminiscent of the reliable groundskeepers of a Sussex estate and a canny sense of American snobbery, Smith & Hawken has spent the past year searching for new and wonderful ways to market $72 Haws watering cans and $42 Felco pruners. Already it has opened 15 stores, with 20 in all planned...
...lost and it was getting dark," says Bonnie Dahan. "Finally, we came upon this man's workshop, and the withies were fabulous. It was a 200-year-old design, and he was the last craftsman who made them. So we made the deal, and we carried them in our catalog as English vine trellises." The real things cost $139; a replica sells for only $28. "We give consumers a choice, that's what we do," says Dahan...