With Christmas never so important to the garden industry as it is this year after a season most would rather forget, garden centres have been pulling out all the stops to make sure festive sales recoup turnover lost this summer.

Reports reach the GTN offices daily of great results from the Christmas campaign in many parts of the UK. Clearly their efforts are paying dividends.

So it’s time to launch GTN’s search for the UK’s top garden centre Christmas teams. The Greatest Christmas Awards – now in their fourth year – aim to recognise the importance to businesses of their festive offerings and to reward the outstanding teamwork that has made the garden centre Christmas the envy of other retail sectors.

The awards are open to all garden centres, regardless of size, and you can read about all the categories to enter in this newsletter. You can enter any, or all, by sending a nomination email to: trevor.pfeiffer@tgcmc.co.uk.

There are three new categories this year:

The Greatest Festive Catering Team

The Greatest Christmas Sizzle

The Greatest Christmas Houseplants Team

Hit the appropriate links on the opening page for details.

You can also invite your customers to vote for you in The Greatest Garden Centre at Christmas Team award. The link will take you to a special download for your Public Voting Pack materials in digital PDF format.

Suppliers get their recognition, too. We’ll be asking every garden centre we visit to nominate their Christmas Supplier of the Year.

Judging gets under way this month and  will be completed by early December. Closing date for entries and nominations is close of play on Monday 26 November.

Good luck!

The Greatest Christmas Awards are organised in association with Harrogate Christmas & Gift, the first major festive and gift trade show of the year. Click the link on the opening page to find out more about the event.