A little light weeding

The first popular gardening book in the English language was Thomas Hyll's The Gardener's Labyrinth, published in 1577. Unlike the herbalists Turner and Gerard who preceded him, Hyll wrote in a down-to-earth way for the common man, and addressed gardening both as a practical pursuit and as a pastime. He pioneered a genre that flourishes to this day. But for how much longer will the gardening book be with us?

In Hyll's time gardening skills were generally picked up by example, and information was passed on by word of mouth. As this form of learning faded the printed page had a unique authority. Now, thanks to our mainly urban environment and the faster pace of life, inherited gardening skills are the exception rather than the rule, and although most of us approach our first garden as complete innocents, publishers and booksellers are no longer the only people eager to seduce us with the facts of life.

Today's virgin gardeners live in a multimedia world where radio and television programmes, videos, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs and the Internet all vie for attention. If you've got the time and the inclination, gardening courses will teach you what to do. If you've got the money and no inclination whatsoever, garden designers and those offering maintenance services will do it all for you. For the masses, garden centres now supply any amount of ready-made garden features and well-grown, disease-resistant plants requiring little or no maintenance. In fact, it is perfectly possible to have a beautiful garden without owning a single gardening book.

Figures from Whitaker BookTrack show that gardening book sales in the General Retail Market in 2000 were down by 6.1% in volume and 9.3% in value on the previous year, even though total book sales in the sector were up. Does this signal the beginning of the end?

As a gardening writer as well as a bookseller, I sincerely hope not; talking to other people in the industry I know it is not. But the marketplace is changing. Publishers especially are bullish because they are finding new retail outlets for gardening books. High street book chains need to keep their wits about them. They are no longer simply chasing each other's customers for the gardening book spend, they are in competition with homeware retailers, e-tailers, supermarkets, DIY outlets, garden centres and book clubs.

Social changes driving the market

Gardening is one of the fastest growing sectors of the leisure industry. The reason is to be found in the underlying social context. The volatile housing market of the '80s saw many homeowners moving quickly from place to place as they raced onto and then up the property ladder. There was no time and little need to improve a property in order to increase its value. The ethos was a mixture of greed and the fear of being left out.

As the boom bottomed out, the next 10 years saw a different pattern emerging. People stayed put for longer; they invested money, time and effort in improving their homes, both to enhance their living standards and to add genuine value to their bricks and mortar. It was a time of consolidation.

Today, everyone is more style-conscious and health-conscious, with the result that gardens have finally achieved the full recognition they deserve as outdoor living spaces. Homeowners are finally prepared to spend the sort of money on designing and decorating a garden that only a little while ago would have been reserved exclusively for indoor use.

The contemporary garden is a place for rest and relaxation; a haven for re-attuning ourselves to the natural world; a source of food, herbs and cut flowers for the home. It is by turns a playground for the children, a dining or party space, a work of modern art or a window on other times or cultures. Our garden can say as much about us as the car we drive, the holidays we take and the clothes we wear. As our definition of the garden expands, so does our understanding of what constitutes a gardening book.

Conran Octopus is a trend-aware publisher whose gardening list accounts for a third of its total turnover of £7m to £8m. Many of these titles cross over into other areas such as cookery, interior design and architecture. They accurately reflect current living patterns and aspirations, enabling the company to reach out to the widest possible audience. Terence Conran's Chef's Garden and Monty and Sarah Don's Fork to Fork re-establish the link between growing and cooking food. They make perfect sense to the book-buyer, but what about the bookseller? Are they gardening books or cookery books? Inside Out by stylist Gilly Love applies the principles of interior decorating to outside spaces—might a bookshop tempt twice as many customers into buying the book by multiple stocking, under interior design and gardening?

Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor's Gardens for the Future encompasses modern architecture, installation art, land art and civic planning. Catharine Snow, Conran's sales and marketing director, believes that "publishers succeed by creating their own readers"; she feels that the success of one cutting-edge book stimulates demand for the next. This is doubly revealing considering the trade's initial response to Cooper and Taylor's previous work, Paradise Transformed (Monacelli): gardeners were ready for it, bookshops were not.

It was our all-time bestseller at Garden Books, thanks to customer referrals from other shops. But because Monacelli is primarily an architectural publisher, its books were difficult to source at that time, so no bookseller can be blamed for not having this title. Nevertheless, the episode illustrates the point that the market is always changing and that constant vigilance is crucial.

Successful publishers combine a philanthropic zeal to educate with a business drive to grow their own niche in the market. According to Catharine Snow, "Conran cultivates brand loyalty by producing cutting-edge editorial in a visually compelling package." This approach guarantees a strong representation of stock and good displays of new titles in a bookshop environment.

Frances Lincoln is proud to produce books with a timeless integrity. And with a stable of writers that includes gardening giants Beth Chatto, Penelope Hobhouse, Christopher Lloyd and Rosemary Verey, her books are a mainstay of gardening departments everywhere.

Gardening is a broad church, yet a range of books with the strongest brand image of them all and with a sales track record that eclipses all others is, curiously, sidelined by many booksellers. I refer, of course, to Dr D G Hessayon's Expert series (Transworld).

Record breaking

The Experts have sold more than 43 million copies worldwide, and in 1999 the author received a Guinness World Record certificate as the best-selling living author of the decade. According to BookTrack, of sales of the top 30 gardening books in 2000, Expert titles accounted for a staggering 41.9% by value. There is an Expert book in one in three households. Yet despite exerting an influence far greater than all other gardeners put together, Dr Hessayon himself prefers to remain in the background. His books are concept-driven, not personality-led.

When I rather cheekily referred him to a recent piece in the Library Review describing him as "Everyman's gardening instructor", and as someone who inhabits a quite different gardening universe from the Prince of Wales, his response was as straightforward and to the point as the Expert books themselves: "Yes, I inhabit a different world to the Prince of Wales and that is exactly where I like to be."

A handful of Expert books one Christmas was my first introduction to gardening literature. Almost three decades down the line and I feel that their importance cannot be overstated. They make it possible for a complete novice to identify a plant or sort out a problem so quickly that the skill and knowledge which have gone into the books can easily go unnoticed.

Transworld launches a series of Pocket Experts this April, and has already reported excellent sales into the supermarket sector, including Asda (recently acquired by American retail giant Walmart). What bookshops make of these Pocket Experts remains to be seen, but if supermarkets can have sweets at every checkout I do not see why gardening departments cannot have Experts as pick-up items by the till. Booksellers should go for that extra sale. If they do not, someone else will.

The non-traditional market

To find out more about book sales into non-traditional outlets I spoke to Diane White, buying director of Advanced Marketing Service (previously known as Aura). AMS offers a tailored wholesale service to garden centres, DIY outlets, stately homes, zoos, department stores and homeware shops. Major gardening clients include Wyevale and Notcutts garden centres, English Heritage, the National Trust and John Lewis. This is where those vanishing book sales are going.

White's mission is "to provide a total solution for the customer", which includes devising an appropriate range of stock for each client then providing continuous back-up in the form of a rep service, merchandising and display materials.

When deciding whether to run with a book, Diane White is concerned to give value to the consumer. Her question is always, "What does it deliver for the price?" If the answers add up, she can move sufficient stock to get exclusive deals on paperback editions with publishers. Geoff Hamilton's Gardener's World Practical Gardening Course is a case in point. Originally published in hardback by the BBC, it is now available in a paperback edition, again from the BBC, to the general book trade—but for three years it was exclusive to AMS.

Many books in garden centres are picked up as add-on purchases by plant buyers. Bonsai and fuchsia books are bestselling categories for AMS. As White points out, the book purchase is an easy decision for the customer because it is small in proportion to the total plant spend.

Sales are no longer seasonal in the way they used to be. Garden centres are now so focused on Christmas, selling real and artificial trees, decorations and gifts in addition to bulbs and houseplants, that business is buoyant all year round. In fact, since garden centres have effectively taken over from department stores where trees and baubles and fairy lights are concerned, AMS capitalises on this new footfall in the run-up to Christmas by shifting clients' stock profiles in favour of gift books and calendars.

Anyone who wants to buy a book online will buy from Amazon, says Crocus.co.uk's founder Peter Clay matter-of-factly. Crocus is a gardening-dedicated Internet retailer that delivers plants, accessories, cut flowers and garden-related gifts throughout the UK. It also offers a design service. Its vans are driven by qualified gardeners who will even plant your purchases for you.

Clay's aim is to provide a complete service, so of course Crocus sells gardening books too, sourced through book wholesaler Gardners. All books are sent to Crocus for re-wrapping in branded packaging before dispatch, so overheads are high, but Clay appreciates the value in reinforcing the company name and the benefit to customers of receiving a basket of different products in one single delivery. For Crocus most books are associated sales—a rose book with a consignment of roses, for example—or last-minute gifts. In the Victorian language of flowers crocus means "cheerfulness". Clay has plenty to smile about.

The specialists' specialists

Mike Park, antiquarian and second-hand gardening book dealer, and Landsman's, farming and horticultural bookseller, are specialists in a specialist field. The clientele of each have very particular interests. These are serviced by Park through several mail-order catalogues a year and by attending the monthly Royal Horticultural Society shows at RHS headquarters in Vincent Square, London, and the annual Chelsea Flower Show.

For its customers, Landsman's has a postal service based on an annual catalogue the size of a paperback novel. It sells direct to farmers, gardeners and horticultural students by taking a large mobile shop on an exhausting tour of county shows and agricultural colleges. Both Mike Park and Landsman's director Peter Stewart are experiencing an increased interest in their services. Park has seen demand for out-of-print gardening classics rise as a result of recommendations on gardening school booklists. With fewer people going into farming, agricultural colleges are broadening their curricula to maintain funding, and Stewart reports greater interest in horticultural and professional floristry titles.

"Celebrity" gardening books are a class apart, because the quality is so variable. Some are mysteriously spirited together by humble servants, others represent a lifetime's achievement, as in the Duchess of Devonshire's The Garden at Chatsworth (Frances Lincoln). Television tie-ins represented 24.1% by value of the top 30 gardening books in 2000, so their market share is significant, but what of their content? Here too the subject is a minefield, but books such as Dan Pearson's The Garden: A Year at Home Farm (Ebury) and Guy Cooper and Gordon Taylor's The Curious Gardeners (Headline) will have a life independent of the series they spring from because they are written from the heart by experts in their field.

Others are generated by programmes that present gardening as spectacle or a race against the clock. Although I sometimes feel such programmes should be prefaced with a stern voice-over along the lines of "Viewers should not attempt to do this at home", it is unlikely that anyone would be fool enough to copy them, and they are riveting to watch. If the books that tie into them capture the spirit of the show and give pleasure to armchair gardeners then I am all for them. Who knows, they might spur people on to do a spot of real gardening.