Eden en blog

Bloggers, too, are gardeners – and gardeners blog as well. The social networking generation’s need to communicate has its positive aspects, especially for those who want to know more precisely how consumers think of their garden – for market researchers, that is. Having also come to this conclusion, Gardena’s parent company Husqvarna asked Kairos Future, a Swedish trend research and consulting firm, to look into the topic. How do those who are active both on the internet and in the garden actually think of their garden? What do they want? What are they looking for? And even: What are their yearnings? Yes, yearnings. This is perhaps the best word to describe the results of the online research. In the final analysis – though this is really nothing new – amateur gardeners are searching for the Garden of Eden. The supposedly worldly-wise internet user is no exception here. Why do the researchers at Kairos Future believe this? What exactly did they do? They read through precisely 1 416 344 so-called blog posts, including any added comments, which explicitly deal with the subject of gardens and originated in any one of the following 13 countries: Australia, Brazil, China, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Poland, Russia, South Africa, Sweden, Britain and the USA. From these postings they then distilled the top ten garden trends – “some more ‘eternal’, others more contemporary and temporary”, as they note. These top trends are:
Kitchen gardening
The organic garden
The feel-good garden
The designed and artistic garden
Re-creating wilderness
The social garden
Urban farming
The lush garden
Container gardening
Greenhouse gardening
But even if the talk here is of trends, the authors particularly stress that amateur gardeners do not regard themselves as trendy. They pursue their hobby not for the sake of external recognition but for the inner pleasure they experience. And yet, as the authors of the survey emphasize, gardeners are trendsetters in spite of themselves. The following is an analysis of the Big Three: Germany, France and Britain. “The smart garden – Der clevere Garten” is the heading for the chapter on Germany in the survey. The authors establish that the garden is shifting away from being a place of maximum effort to one offering the greatest enjoyment. The idea of effortless enjoyment is even modifying the legendary environmental awareness of Germans. The survey quotes one blogger’s opinion: “Solar lights are not only eco-friendly but they also save a…