Every garden centre manager knows the customer.

They arrive carrying a plant tag.

Sometimes a phone.

Frequently an opinion.

“This is Zone 5.”

Pause.

“We’re Zone 4.”

And suddenly a perfectly good perennial assortment is on trial.

The complaint is understandable.

Hardiness matters in Canada.

Winter is real.

Consumers should be told honestly whether a plant is likely to survive in their region.

But something strange can happen when retailers hear these complaints often enough.

The exceptional conversation begins influencing the entire assortment.

One customer complains.

Another complains three weeks later.

Someone posts something online.

Eventually a retailer starts wondering whether every perennial in a collection should conform to the same hardiness zone.

That sounds prudent.

It can also be a serious merchandising mistake.

Because the question is not:

Does hardiness matter?

Of course it does.

The better question is:

How much should hardiness matter relative to everything else consumers are buying?

And that answer is considerably more complicated.

First, A Zone Is Not a Warranty

It is worth remembering what a hardiness zone actually is.

Natural Resources Canada’s current Plant Hardiness system uses climatic information to help estimate what can grow where. Canada’s system incorporates multiple climate variables, while the USDA-style system is based primarily on extreme minimum winter temperatures. The Canadian maps were updated again using 1991 to 2020 climate data.

That makes hardiness zones extremely useful.

But a zone is still a model.

It is not a guarantee that every Zone 4 plant survives every Zone 4 garden.

And the reverse is also true.

Gardeners routinely grow plants beyond the neat boundaries suggested by a map.

Why?

Because the garden itself interferes.

Snow cover.

Wind exposure.

Drainage.

Mulch.

Soil.

Slope.

Winter moisture.

Protected walls.

Urban heat.

Plant establishment.

Genetics.

Timing.

A south-facing foundation bed and an exposed rural property can occupy the same postal region while behaving very differently horticulturally.

The zone gives us probability.

The garden supplies reality.

That distinction matters because retail sometimes treats the zone number as though it were an expiration date stamped onto the plant.

It isn’t.

Now Consider the Consumer

Here is where things become even more interesting.

Horticultural professionals naturally think about perennials according to longevity.

Annual.

Biennial.

Perennial.

Shrub.

Tree.

These classifications describe the plant.

They do not necessarily describe the way the consumer values it.

A horticulturist may see a perennial and think:

This should return for years.

A consumer may be thinking:

That would look fantastic beside my deck this summer.

Those are different economic propositions.

The first emphasizes durability.

The second emphasizes enjoyment.

Neither is necessarily wrong.

Gardening Is Not Appliance Shopping

Suppose you buy a washing machine.

If the salesperson tells you:

“This should last one season, but you’ll really enjoy using it,”

you will probably leave.

Durability is central to the economic value of the washing machine.

Gardening operates differently.

A gardener buys:

flowers

colour

change

experimentation

seasonal projects

something new to try

something to care for

something to rearrange

something to look forward to

There is substantial research showing that gardening is motivated by the activity itself, not merely by the permanent possession of the plants.

A large UK study involving more than 5,700 gardeners found that pleasure was the primary motivation for gardening, ahead of the health benefits participants might receive from it.

Another study of 1,000 urban and suburban residents found that intrinsic motivations involving enjoyment and meaning were the strongest predictors of time spent front gardening.

Earlier work with garden-centre customers found motivations including time outdoors, observing nature, relaxation, working with one’s hands and importantly, the novelty of trying new plants.

That last one deserves attention.

Trying new plants.

If gardening were purely about creating a permanent collection that never needed to change, novelty would be economically inconvenient.

Instead, novelty is part of the pleasure.

The Garden Is Never Finished

This may be one of the fundamental misunderstandings behind the hardiness debate.

We sometimes imagine the consumer building a garden as though they were furnishing a room.

Buy hosta.

Done.

Buy peony.

Done.

Buy echinacea.

Done.

Eventually the garden should be complete and purchasing should stop.

But gardeners know that almost nothing works this way.

The garden changes.

Plants become too large.

Plants disappear.

Plants get moved.

Colours stop working.

A neighbour gives you something.

You suddenly become interested in ornamental grasses.

Then dahlias.

Then pollinators.

Then fruit.

A tree comes down and the shade garden becomes a sun garden.

A shrub grows and the sun garden becomes a shade garden.

Someone sees a plant on Instagram.

Someone visits another garden.

Someone decides that yellow flowers are suddenly unacceptable after liking them for fifteen years.

Gardens are dynamic consumption environments.

There is no obvious finish line.

Canada’s Sales Numbers Tell an Interesting Story

We should be careful here.

Industry sales cannot tell us exactly why an individual consumer bought another plant.

But they can tell us whether Canadians have somehow finished gardening.

They clearly have not.

Statistics Canada reports that 59 percent of Canadian households grew fruit, herbs, vegetables or flowers for personal use in 2023. Among households that gardened, 76 percent did so in their yards, while substantial numbers also grew plants on balconies and indoors. Canadian households spent an average of $452 on garden supplies and services in 2023.

The commercial market continues as well.

Canadian greenhouse flower and plant sales reached approximately $2.44 billion in 2025, up from roughly $1.58 billion in 2019. Nursery sales and resales were approximately $853 million in 2025.

Those figures do not prove that consumers deliberately buy Zone 5 perennials expecting them to die.

We should not claim they do.

But they do demonstrate something important.

Gardening generates recurring demand.

Consumers continue buying living plants year after year even though many of the products they bought previously are presumably still alive.

That fact alone should change how we think about plant longevity as the sole measure of consumer value.

If Everything Survived, Would Sales Disappear?

Imagine, for a moment, the perfect garden.

Every perennial survives.

Every plant reaches its intended size.

Nothing becomes overcrowded.

Nothing disappoints.

Nothing needs moving.

The gardener never changes their mind.

No new breeding arrives.

No new colours become fashionable.

No one expands a bed.

Nobody creates another container.

Nobody experiments.

Nobody sees something they simply have to have.

Would perennial sales eventually collapse?

Perhaps.

Fortunately for the horticultural industry, that garden does not exist.

Gardening is partly a process of continual creation.

That is why the economic life of the category cannot be understood merely by measuring the biological lifespan of the individual product.

Perennial Does Not Mean Permanent

This might be the phrase worth remembering.

Perennial is a botanical classification, not a consumer contract.

Some perennials will occupy the same garden for decades.

Wonderful.

Some will last several seasons.

Some will struggle.

Some will be planted in containers and effectively treated as seasonal material.

Some will be removed because the gardener no longer wants them.

Some will be replaced by something newer.

Some will be moved three times before mysteriously disappearing.

The customer can still have received value.

That concept feels uncomfortable if we define success exclusively as survival.

But consumers purchase many experiences with finite lives.

Cut flowers.

Vacations.

Restaurant meals.

Concerts.

Christmas trees.

None is considered a failure because it did not last ten years.

Duration matters.

It simply does not define all value.

A Garden Centre Is Not an Arboretum

This distinction is particularly important in retail.

An arboretum can organize almost entirely around horticultural taxonomy and long-term performance.

A retail garden centre has another responsibility.

It has to respond to what customers want to buy.

That means balancing:

regional suitability

plant performance

appearance

colour

novelty

price

seasonality

new introductions

garden uses

consumer trends

availability

and yes, hardiness

Hardiness belongs on the list.

It does not necessarily deserve to become the list.

The Vocal Customer Problem

This is where the retail psychology becomes important.

Human beings naturally overweight vivid information.

A customer standing directly in front of the garden-centre manager saying:

“You shouldn’t carry this here”

is vivid.

The 300 customers who quietly bought something and left are invisible.

There is no conversation.

No complaint.

No meeting.

No memorable incident.

Yet commercially, their behaviour may be more important.

Marketing research has long recognized that customers who actively complain are not necessarily representative of the full customer population. Mel Moyer’s research on consumer complainants found systematic differences between active complainers and more passive consumers and concluded that complaint systems should be supplemented by other market-intelligence tools.

That is not an argument for ignoring complaints.

Complaints are valuable.

Sometimes they expose real problems faster than sales reports do.

But a complaint is a data point, not a referendum.

Listen to the Customer. Then Look at the Data.

Suppose three customers complain about a Zone 5 perennial being sold in a colder market.

Take it seriously.

Now ask:

How many units did we sell?

At what price?

How quickly?

Were there markdowns?

Did customers return them?

Did the category grow?

Did retailers reorder?

Did the same customers buy similar material?

How did our strongest stores perform with the same assortment?

Now we have information.

The complaint tells us:

Some customers dislike this.

The sales data may tell us:

Many more customers chose it anyway.

Both can be true.

Retail intelligence requires holding both thoughts at once.

Your Best Stores May Be Telling You Something

In our own Canadian Tire business, there is an important observation worth considering.

Some of our strongest garden-centre customers, including stores at the very top of the business, successfully purchase and sell collections containing plants with different hardiness-zone ratings.

They do not appear to regard uniform hardiness as a prerequisite for a commercially successful perennial program.

That is not a controlled scientific experiment.

But it is valuable field evidence.

When strong operators repeatedly buy, merchandise and sell a broader assortment successfully, we should pay attention.

Retail best practice often hides in the behaviour of the best retailers.

The question becomes:

What do they understand that more cautious stores may be missing?

Perhaps they understand that the customer is shopping a garden centre, not a hardiness database.

Assortments Have to Be Merchandised as Assortments

There is also a retailing principle at stake.

A collection is designed to create coherence.

It may be organized around:

colour

garden use

season

theme

benefit

aesthetic

planting style

consumer project

Breaking a collection apart solely because individual varieties carry different zone ratings can destroy the very commercial logic that made the collection useful.

Suddenly the consumer sees fragments instead of a proposition.

This does not mean hiding the zone.

Quite the opposite.

Keep the collection together. Make the hardiness information obvious. Let the consumer decide.

That is a much more customer-centred philosophy.

Information Is Better Than Prohibition

Suppose a garden centre in Zone 4 carries a particularly beautiful Zone 5 perennial.

There are at least two possible retail philosophies.

The first:

Don’t sell it.

The second:

Sell it honestly.

Zone 5. Best performance in protected locations.

Now the retailer has informed rather than prohibited.

The experienced gardener may know exactly what they are doing.

They may have a protected courtyard.

They may grow it in a container.

They may enjoy pushing zones.

They may be entirely comfortable treating it as an experiment.

They may simply love the plant enough to try.

Who are we protecting by refusing to let them make that choice?

Gardeners Have Always Experimented

Experimentation is not a defect in gardening.

It is almost foundational to it.

Gardeners divide plants.

Move plants.

Save seed.

Try new varieties.

Grow something everyone says should not work.

Occasionally they are rewarded spectacularly.

Sometimes they are not.

Research on gardening motivation has explicitly identified novelty and trying new plants as part of the appeal of gardening.

A perennial department stripped of experimentation in pursuit of perfect climatic certainty may become horticulturally safe and commercially dull.

Those are not the same thing.

The Zone Number Can Become a Heuristic

There is another behavioural risk.

Once the hardiness zone becomes the dominant attribute, customers may begin using it as a shortcut for the entire evaluation.

Zone 3?

Good plant.

Zone 5?

Bad plant.

But that tells us almost nothing about whether the consumer actually wants it.

Hardiness answers:

What is the climatic probability of overwintering?

It does not answer:

Is it beautiful?

Does it fit my space?

Do I like the colour?

Will pollinators use it?

Is it unusual?

Does it flower when I want colour?

Would I enjoy growing it?

Those questions create demand.

Hardiness constrains demand.

Retailing requires understanding both.

We Should Not Confuse Durability With Value

A concrete garden ornament may last thirty years.

A spectacular perennial may last three.

Which created more value?

There is no universal answer.

Value is experienced by the consumer.

Research into gardening repeatedly shows the importance of enjoyment, nature connection, relaxation and aesthetic experience. One large gardening study found pleasure itself was the leading reason people gardened. Another study found enjoyment and intrinsic benefit were the strongest motivational predictors of time spent gardening.

That suggests we should be cautious about defining horticultural value exclusively through longevity.

A gardener may rationally prefer three wonderful seasons from a plant they love over fifteen years from one they don’t.

This Does Not Mean Zones Are Irrelevant

They are not.

A responsible retailer should:

clearly communicate hardiness

avoid misleading claims

understand local climatic realities

watch returns and complaints

identify chronically poor performers

train staff appropriately

differentiate plants requiring special situations

make informed regional assortment decisions

The mistake is moving from:

Hardiness matters

to:

Nothing outside the local zone belongs in the assortment.

Those are very different positions.

One is horticultural responsibility.

The other can become retail overcorrection.

Manage Exceptions. Don’t Design the Entire Business Around Them.

Suppose ten percent of customers care intensely about strict zone adherence.

Serve them.

Make the information easy to find.

Help them choose.

Perhaps even identify a particularly hardy group.

Excellent.

But do not automatically assume the other ninety percent wants the entire perennial department redesigned around that concern.

This is one of the recurring challenges in retail management.

The customer with the strongest preference is frequently the customer most motivated to communicate it.

The customer who thinks:

“That’s beautiful. I’ll take two.”

rarely asks to speak to the manager.

They buy.

Behaviour Is the Ultimate Vote

Retailers have access to something more powerful than opinion.

Actual purchasing behaviour.

Consumers may say many things.

What they repeatedly put into their carts is another form of evidence.

The strongest assortment decisions therefore combine:

customer feedback

sell-through

year-over-year sales

markdown rates

returns

regional results

reorders

store-level performance

and professional horticultural judgment

No single metric should dominate.

Including complaints.

Canada Is Still Gardening

The broader market context is worth remembering.

Nearly three in five Canadian households reported growing flowers, fruit, herbs or vegetables for personal use in 2023.

Canadian greenhouse flower and plant sales have continued growing, reaching about $2.44 billion in 2025, while nursery sales remained above $850 million.

Whatever consumers are doing with all those plants, they have not stopped wanting more of them.

That should tell us something.

The economic engine of gardening is not simply replacement caused by death.

It is participation.

People garden.

And gardening creates consumption.

The Better Question

Perhaps we have been asking:

Will this plant survive forever?

when the consumer is asking something else.

Will I enjoy this?

Will it make my garden beautiful?

Is this interesting?

Can I use it here?

Would I like to try it?

That is where the future article on outcomes will take us more deeply.

But for now, the distinction matters.

The garden centre’s job is not merely to sell biological longevity.

It is to sell horticultural possibility responsibly.

Hardiness Should Inform the Sale

Not control it.

Tell customers the zone.

Explain what it means.

Be candid about risk.

Know your region.

Learn from genuine failures.

Listen respectfully when customers complain.

Then step back.

Look at what the entire market is telling you.

Look at your sell-through.

Look at your strongest stores.

Look at repeat demand.

Look at what gardeners actually buy.

Because the loudest voice in the garden centre is still only one voice.

And sometimes the most important customers are the ones who never complain at all.

They simply see something beautiful.

Pick it up.

Take it home.

Plant it.

And come back next spring looking for something new.

Sources

Canada’s Plant Hardiness Site

Natural Resources Canada, 2026.

The Backyard Harvest

Statistics Canada, 2025.

Sales of Greenhouse, Nursery and Sod Products

Statistics Canada, 2026.

Domesticated Nature: Motivations for Gardening and Perceptions of Environmental Impact

Carolyn R. Clayton, 2007.

Why Garden? Attitudes and the Perceived Health Benefits of Home Gardening

Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui, Alistair Griffiths, Jenny Roe, Timothy Heaton and Ross Cameron, 2021.

Motivations for Urban Front Gardening: A Quantitative Analysis

Urban landscape researchers, 2023.

Benefit Information’s Impact on Ornamental Plant Value

Horticultural consumer researchers, 2023.

Characteristics of Consumer Complainants: Implications for Marketing and Public Policy

Mel S. Moyer, 1984.