I won't pay more for the same variety of plants from a nursery when the box stores have them for a lot less.

I expect nurseries to carry in addition to basics, usual varieties that are not available at the box stores.
I rarely find that to be true, however.

For instance, I can get a 1 gallon mystic spires salvia at Home Depot for $4. The huge, "gourmet" nursery wanted $5 for a "4 pot. But what I really went looking for was Indigo Spires and I would have paid quite a bit if they had it...and other interesting unusual salvias.

Variety - you need to carry a bigger variety than the Big Box stores.
Knowledge - The BB store folks don't have a clue and don't know a caladium from a hydrangea. You need to hire garden savy folks.
Tags - with growing info and prices.
Customer Service - if you don't have it tell the customer where to get it, offer to find it for them, order it and call the customer with the info. That will build customer loyalty.

Have a couple of educated, knowledgeable horticulturists and put them to work being problem solvers for your customers. Become an educational resource by conducting weekend seminars on a wide variety of horticultural topics. Stock your garden center with products that will sell themselves after the seminars.

Offer a good selection of (so-called) 'organic' (or alternative) pesticides, fertilizers, etc. Make sure that the employees know how, when, and why to use the products.

Design the garden center with customers in mind: plenty of wagons, easy-to-navigate aisles (inside and out), enough staff to help tote plants and load vehicles.

Provide shade for some of the outdoor shopping areas, not only for plants but people.

Be on the cutting edge with what's new in the industry. Popular gardening magazines can be a good source of information, as can on line catalogs. "Southern Living" recommendations often result in a flurry of queries for specific plants, for example.

Help reduce operating costs by using intelligent watering techniques, efficient fertilization practices (if needed), and diligent employees that know how to care for plants, as well as SELL products.

First, unusual plants - I can't tell you how many nurseries I've tried in order to find certain plants. There are some unusuals that no one carries. I even look for them when I am on vacation and have new nurseries near me - no luck.

Second, good prices. If the nursery carries the unusual plant, or not-so-unusual, I still can't have it if the price is too high. Plus, if the prices are consistantly high, esp if the unusual stuff isn't there, I just stop going to the nursery. In addition, I'd rather buy a four-inch pot of something, or a 1-gallon, that I can afford, than see a 20-gallon ready to flower that is out of my price range. I don't mind waiting for a small one to grow as I may not be comfortable with a fifty dollar larger plant.

Third, labels with common AND latin names plus cultivars if applicable. If it is cheaper to buy wholesale without knowing which species or cultivar, that is fine, but if you know and the plants aren't labeled, label the plants yourself or inform at checkout from your electronic files

Seminars on weekends about anything gardening is a great idea, esp if you have them free. It draws people in, and educates them.

I've seen some nurseries cater to high-end buyers, and they may have some unusual plants, but usually not. If this is the case, I often do not visit that often.

I look for nurseries that have really odd plants, latin names and cultivars, down-to-earth atmosphere, knowledgeable people. If plants are labeled according to their families and/or soil and zone conditions and their role as butterfly and wildlife food that's great. Overall atmosphere is best if it's intelligent, educated, some science, and horticulturally oriented.

Also, I can't stand seeing dying or unwanted plants tossed in the trash. These are living things, and inventory that needs to go needs to go to charity or be reduced to next to nothing rather than get tossed. Plenty of master gardeners or students or schools or communities could use these. Plants that won't make it through a winter could get a last chance as freebies before the first freeze as many customers don't mind overwintering tropicals whereas the nursery cannot. If customers can find freebies and greatly reduced inventory that needs TLC, they'll come into the store often. If normal prices are affordable they'll buy before the plants deteriorate or go under for the winter.

If you have an easy way to sterilize empty pots, ask customers to return their empty pots after they plant their merchandise into the ground - that is if the customer is just going to toss the empty into the trash. This could save you on pot costs, and save the trash landfills.

If you need plants you can't find wholesale, you could post a listing in the store of such plants. Customers who grow them might be happy to share seeds or offsets of these plants which you could then grow and multiply, offering all customers more variety.

Good luck, and enjoy. Set up a great nursery - they're so very hard to find.

One of the nurseries here often has unusual plants....in 30 gallon pots that cost a bunch. I also like to see the unusual in small pots that are affordable.
For instance, $40 sugar maple cultivars instead of the instant tree $300 pot.

The one thing I can't stand about nurseries is the fact that they do not have any info on the plant or the prices. I'm a beginning gardener and I really don't know a lot about the plants. I would rather have everything listed on the pot or a sign than have a person following me around.

Awesome tips! My mom and I visited a well-known nursery yesterday to purchase vegetable plants. The place barely has room to walk through, the customer service stinks, the sales people rarely smile,parking is horrible, and they are very overpriced. So why in the heck do they stay PACKED!?? The quality of the plants is good, and they do have a big selection.

From reading your responses, I think it's best not to sell something we can't provide information on. One thing I'm worried about is that we are going to start out really small, and I hope that doesn't put people off. They may feel that we don't have enough to offer and never come back. In the beginning it's going to be Mom and myself, selling our own propagated plants. We don't have the funds to start out big.

So how would you suggest we start small? Here's what we're thinking:

Mom and I will invest in a greenhouse for our homes. We will propagate and sell plants at yardsales, farmer's markets, fairs, and even on the side of the road. We could pass out business cards and let buyers know we plan to open a garden center. We could have them provide us with their email address so that we can inform them of our next plant sale location, prices, and items for sale.

Be sure you understand about patented plants, should you be tempted to propagate those that are still under license agreements. Just thought I'd mention that early on.

I think that if you are going to grow your own plants, then you need to focus on the farmer's markets, craft shows, etc. I don't think that most people have a good grip on how many thousands of plants that even a small garden center needs to move in a single busy day. Heck, I've seen farmer's market vendors that sold out of their own stock in a day, and began re-wholesaling!

If starting small, focus on just a few things that you'll specialize in. For example, don't grow just the common tomato hybrids, but find some of the great heirloom varieties.

Knowledgeable, friendly, helpful staff is number 1.

Latest available cultivars of tough, drought resistant plants (as well as some old favorites). I worked in garden centers for years, managed a couple. I will tell you the VAST majority of people want easy care, lots of blooms, what is hot at the moment (currently double knock out roses are all the rage according to my garden center owner friends).

A big plus at our centers was our ability to diagnose problems. Educate your staff on telltale signs of pests, weeds, and have products to control them!

There is a garden center guy here who pushes the more organic fertilizers, soil activaters, etc. I will post a link so you can research some of the stuff he carries if you are interested.

About organic pesticides, please remember organic does not necessarily mean non toxic or even less toxic, make sure your customers know that too!

Good luck to you! It is my dream of 20 years and counting to open a garden center of my own one day, when the kids have flown the coop and I have the time it takes to invest in it!

I shop at the BB stores only for mushroom compost and their marked down plants because they don't know how to care for them.

Here is a link that might be useful: videos on organic fertilizers

The trouble with garden centers is that the owners want to make it a year-round business. They spend a lot of dollars on non-plant materials and indoor plants and trees/landscape green shrubs and wind up belly up after a few years with stale inventory.
It's a year round business but the 'closed for the season' months are spent trimming,weeding,tagging dormant perennials in storage and repotting the shrubs/trees into larger pots and making sure the trees haven't rooted through the pots into the ground.
When you own a garden business, it's tempting to go to the trade shows and tempting to branch out into home/garden decor as a sideline but resist it with all your might. It's dollars wasted. Dollars you will need to keep your accounts current so you can get faster delivery of the quantity of plants that are being promoted in the gardening magazines.
Be judicious in your purchases of soil care products that lose potency with storage. It's better to lose one sale because you're out of stock than to lose a dozen customers because you sold 3-4 year old stale product because you bought too much.
My favorite center lasted 10 years or so and it was my favorite because there I could find the unique and the unusual and the slightly out of zone perennials I could treat as annuals here.
They had a few trees but only the unique. That girl knew what every other center in the area carried and their prices. She sourced the unique to stock and directed her regulars to get the common/ordinary at another reputable center not far away.
Her employees knew the plant materials and which to water more heavily.
Big box stores water as though they were carrying only one kind of plant. Water is expensive here.
Her plants didn't come with piggyback weeds and tree seedlings.

It's easy to buy from grower/wholesalers and toss the flats on a table. But, the big box centers with their high volume,big advertising budgets can sell at a much lower price.
The niche market is for the unique,the forgotten varieties,the natives.

Thanks for your tips Dottie. We definately don't want stale inventory!!! That's something to think about when we are placing orders.

We do plan to have a layer of garden fabric with gravel on top to help prevent plants from rooting and give them good drainage.

We don't want to carry a lot of decor, but we would like to offer some gardening tools, gloves, kneepads, etc.

I have previous ordering experience, so I'm hoping I'll be able to time our orders just right. We will order less of the perishable items (plants, seeds, soil) more often, and try to take advantage of out-of-season sales on non-perishables (books, tools, gloves).

It's funny you should mention selling unique items as I thought about this all weekend long. I was planning to research all the Zone 7 plants I can find and pick out unusuals. I would then get with Mom to see which ones we think we could carry.

These posts are such eye-openers...

Once you get your unusuals and uniques, Pay particular attention to signage. "Hard to Find", "Treat These as Annuals"(plant offerings from out of zone).
Read the comments on these forums. An important issue with gardeners choosing to go to independents rather than big box centers is the quality of employees for help and advice.
It's tempting to hire simple laborers for everyday chores but if they aren't English speaking, not familiar with gardening and horticultural issues or simply not suited to deal with the public (not personable), you could do better.

It's remarkable how many posters just on the Carolina forum work in garden centers. They learn from the forums and they learn on the job and the information they share is invaluable to both communities of gardening enthusiasts.

Another rising issue important to gardeners, and only now being addressed by garden centers is the identification of plants that are deer resistant.

Accept that you have to turn away folks looking for a petunia/impatiens/begonia/geranium common planting. Those who just want a spot of color but are too busy and not really interested in soil and growing plants. You'll never beat the big boxes on price and the labor and water costs will eat up your profits.
Again..read the forums to see what people who are gardeners have trouble finding.
Think how land development has narrowed lots and how many people are desperate to find fastigiate,medium height(6-10')evergreen plantings for privacy. That issue has been discussed for years on these forums.
Educate your customers on the value of native plants and the hazards of invasives.
Highlight your drought-resistant plants. We may not be in a drought right now or this summer but we still have deluge of people moving to North Carolina and the burbs are still sprouting housing developments ..more people drawing on limited water resources.
The flip side of drought resistance is rain garden type plants..tolerating occasional wet feet and growing happily.
Just some random thoughts on how you can be a unique garden center that will attract from far beyond your area.