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Publishers say young will embrace gardening

The under-35 set will breathe new life into gardening, the trade magazine Publishers Weekly reported. Interest in aesthetic improvements and a desire to grow their own food will prompt young consumers to take up trowels. Gardening information readily available on the Internet will help make the hobby more accessible to novices.

Green thumbs are proliferating from an unexpected source.

According to the National Gardening Association (NGA), an estimated record 91 million households participated in one or more types of DIY indoor and outdoor lawn and garden activities in 2005. In 2006, homeowners spent a record $44.7 billion to hire professional lawn and landscape services. Taken together, these figures represent a dramatic increase in gardening interest and expenditures. So where is this growth coming from, and who's expanding the gardening market—a market which has previously been viewed as dying on the vine?

The answer, according to many publishers, authors and educators, is young people. In a world going green, the under-35s have taken it upon themselves to make positive use of their natural surroundings. College courses and easily accessible online resources have turned what was once referred to as a middle-aged pastime into a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry. Before the rise of the Internet, those who may have desired to grow their own tomatoes might have been baffled by the prospect, struggling to find information in their local library. Today, however, prospective gardeners are but a few clicks away from a plethora of knowledge. And gardening is so popular with the younger set that a Google search combining young + people + gardening yields 42.7 million results.

Pam Art, president of Storey Publishing, believes that two factors are responsible for the surge of young gardeners: a heightened awareness of green issues and an interest in preserving natural resources—and the ability to do it in one's own backyard. “Perhaps not since the 1970s and the homesteading era has the interest been so great in gardening using ecologically sound methods, including having organic lawns and flower and vegetable gardens,” says Art.

With an ecological crisis looming, Cool Springs publisher Roger Waynick sees young people turning to gardening as a means of “nurturing the planet back to health.” Each individual gardener, he says, believes he or she is “taking care of their little piece of earth.”

The ecologically conscious gardener is also likely to be more selective when it comes to what he or she eats. Community supported agriculture and organizations such as the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, as well as farmer's markets found in virtually every community are also part of this trend, says Pam Art.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6534626.html