Gardening

By Andrew Grabois - Aug 13 , 2007

Americans spend $40 billion a year on their lawns and billions more on their gardens, yet gardening books are, as Publishers Weekly puts it, “the poor relation in the gardening business.”

According to Simba Information’s annual report, Business of Consumer Book Publishing, gardening books generated just $157 million dollars in 2006, an increase of less than 1% over 2005. Since 2004, sales in the category have decreased almost 5%.

Consumer dollars spent on gardening books accounted for less than 3% of all consumer dollars spent on books last year, about the same as 2005. The top five revenue-generating publishers rang up about $90 million in sales, or over 57% of all dollars spent in the category. The top houses in 2006 were Hachette Group, Random House, Readers Digest, Meredith and Rodale Press. Hachette alone accounted for almost $44 million in sales, or 28% of the total.

The last couple of years, Publishers Weekly has interviewed booksellers and gardening publishers to see where they think the category is heading. They were not very upbeat, saying that , “We’ve become a nation of casual gardeners instead of gardening enthusiasts,” and, more ominously, that there’s “a national gardening fatigue.” A few insiders blamed the Baby Boomers for the slump in gardening books.

Worried about declining attendance, a garden show producer commissioned a study that showed both Boomers and their gardens have aged, and that they’re spending less time tending to their gardens and buying fewer gardening books. “Their interest hasn’t disappeared,” he said, “but the intensity has declined.” And while Boomers saw their gardens as sanctuaries, the new generation sees them as “a social space, a place to entertain and be in for family fun.” Nobody could find a silver lining. All they could do was hope that sales have bottomed out. Last year, according to the National Gardening Association, 8.2 million U.S. households bought a gardening book, down from 11 million in 2001.

Other observations from the PW interviews:

• A potential area for growth are books that address the desire of many to treat the backyard as an extension of the house, an outdoor living space; sales of “hardscaping” titles are increasing
• Non-gardeners are underserved
• Most gardeners are too experienced for the general works and primers that are still being published in great numbers
• There aren’t enough books devoted to gardening maintenance activities like pruning, weeding, and repairing stone walls
• There’s a growing interest in small, urban, vegetable, organic, and container gardens
• With fewer gardening books being published, some booksellers are filling empty shelves with remainders and sidelines
• Sales of regional titles has become increasingly important to booksellers because national sell-through is too competitive
• Except for places like California, gardening is seasonal

The downward trend of gardening book sales in recent years has been mirrored in the declining number of new gardening books published in the U.S. According to Books In Print, 626 new gardening books were published in 2006, virtually unchanged from 2005. The 2006 total was a 27% decrease from 2004, and a 35% decrease from the peak year of 1997. Below is a graph charting the trend of new gardening books published between 2002 and 2006:

Of the 626 new gardening books published in 2006:

• 36% were hardcovers
• 3% were published for children or young adults
• 2% were reviewed in at last one source monitored by Bowker
• 0% appeared on at least one bestseller list monitored by Bowker

Bestselling gardening books at Amazon and Barnes & Noble include:

• Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting and Pruning Techniques, by Tracy DiSabato-Aust (Timber Press)
• Sunset Western Garden Book, by Kathleen Brenzel (Sunset Books)
• All New Square Foot Gardening, by Mel Bartholomew (Cool Springs Press)
• The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible: Discover Ed’s High-Yield W-O-R-D System for All North American Gardening (Storey Books)
• Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long (Chelsea Green Publishing)
• From Vines to Wines: The Complete Guide to Growing Grapes and Making Your Own Wine, by Jeff Cox (Storey Books)
• ]Designing with Succulents, by Debra Lee Baldwin (Timber Press)
• 1001 Gardens You Must See Before You Die, by Rae Spencer Jones (Barron’s Educational Series)
• The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World, by Michael Pollan (Random House)