Christmas has saved the day for garden centre retailing, with the last three weeks providing three of the Top 5 busiest sales weeks of the year.

As predicted earlier in the year by GTN Bestsellers, Christmas sales have taken year-to-date volume sales to within half a percent of parity with sales in 2011.

For the data anoraks out there, 33 out of 50 trading weeks in 2012 were up year-on-year, 27 weeks were down year-on-year, with the biggest change coming in week 17 (week ending 29 April), which was down by a crunching 50% – ouch!

So in a year when the weather really played havoc with the core activity of gardening, it’s a good job we’ve not had snow to spoil the recovery party in the run-up to Christmas.

Remember, in 2010 snow really took the edge off Christmas with only one week of Christmas trading making it into the Top 5 weeks of the year.

As Christmas gets sold off, (we’ve seen several half-price sales already under way while we’ve been out and about), thoughts are now turning to how we can make the most of next year, whatever the weather is going to throw at us.

Waterlogged gardens over winter could mean a slower than usual start, so centres will want to put maximum effort into pulling customers in through catering offerings and early bird bargains.

If you’d like to share your forecast for the year ahead, let us know and we’ll add your thoughts to our predictions for 2013. E-mail trevor.pfeiffer@tgcmc.co.uk

The past three years compared...