The NY Times has published a great article about gardening coaches, for people who want some help to bring their garden up to a new level, but who don’t want to simply write a check and hand it over to a landscaper or a landscape architect.

Their target audience — do-it-yourselfers in search of enlightenment — occupies a middle ground between the people who simply sit back and watch, while others do the planting and mulching, and amateur plant killers whose gardening strategy can best be summed up as trowel and error.

The article also includes an interesting theory about why people turn to gardening coaches.

According to Sara Begg, the executive editor of Horticulture magazine, the emergence of coaches may have something to do with an increased interest in gardening as a hobby among the 30-something crowd — and an utter lack of grounding in it: “While I learned gardening from my mother and grandmother, I don’t know these days if most people have that training passed down.

I think the concept is great. There’s nothing more satisfying than doing something yourself, and now there’s finally someone who can direct you and tell what to do. It’s overwhelming to look at all those landscaping and gardening books and try to figure out what you want to do without guidance from someone who knows your area and climate.

There’s such a wide range of how much effort people put into their yards and gardens, and this is really a cool twist.

I am pretty sure that I am the only person on my entire block who mows his own lawn, except for one other guy (who uses an electric mower, woo hoo!). So it’s all lawn crews, except for me with my Scotts Classic reel mower, and him with his Black & Decker electric.

Maybe we need more lawn and garden coaches in Dallas.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 7:50 pm and is filed under In the News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.