The HTA’s ‘Gardening is good for you’ campaign will set out to help the industry to press home the many benefits of gardens and gardening to health and wellbeing.
Month by month, it will also feature topical gardening activities and ‘Plants of the Moment’ to guide customers throughout the year.
Gardens have been been to relieve stress, improving wellbeing and creativity.
The campaign encourages retailers to show customers how to create their own personal sanctuary outside their own back door, grow healthy food, welcome in wildlife and spend time with family and friends.
“Gardening could be described as the Natural Health Service, as doctors recognise the numerous benefits gardening brings without the need for costly therapies and drugs, with their unwelcome side effects,” the association says. For instance, growing organic home-grown crops like herbs in even the smallest of spaces can provides at least some of the ‘5 a day’ we are told we should aim for.
By choosing the right plants, consumers can design gardens that encourage birds, bees, butterflies and other wildlife to drop in for food, water and shelter, or even take up residence.
PLANTS OF THE MOMENT: YEAR-ROUND COLOUR & INTEREST
By creating a garden that looks great all-year-round, gardens will have not only a beautiful outlook but will create more incentives to venture outside throughout the year.
The best plants to give a garden structure include:
Choisya eg ‘Sundance’ AGM, ‘Aztec Pearl’ AGM- Hebe ‘Red Edge’ AGM
- Skimmia x confusa ‘Kew Green’ AGM
- Skimmia japonica ‘Fragrans’ AGM
- Photinia eg ‘Red Robin’ AGM
- Physocarpus opulifolius ‘Diabolo’ AGM (pictured)
- Japanese spotted laurel - Aucuba japonica ‘Crotonifolia’ AGM
- Osmanthus x burkwoodii AGM
- Elaeagnus x submacrophylla ‘Limelight’
- Euonymus, Pieris, etc
-
For further information click here
