Home Depot Has a $20 Billion Secret Garden

To keep shoppers coming back, the retailer needs them to be successful planting. It is breeding plants to help, and it’s time to see if the strategy works.

Atlanta One morning this winter, I woke up and smelled the roses. And the petunias.

It was a chilly day in early March when I walked into an industrial warehouse behind Suite 900 of an office park, only to find that it was bursting with flowers and the people who breed, grow and sell them. There were angelonias here, dahlias there and vincas everywhere.

The space had been transformed into a garden center for a spectacle that Home Depot shoppers will never get to see. Or smell.

The event is known inside the company as spring trials. This invitationonly showcase is where breeders flaunt their latest offerings and Home Depot’s suppliers get their first glimpse of new plants that the retailer spent years helping to develop.

Soon they will make their way from greenhouses to Home Depots—and then your garden.

The garden business rakes in about $20 billion a year for Home Depot— more than appliances, lumber or paint. It’s one of the biggest departments of the biggest home-improvement retailer, covering everything from live goods like plants, flowers and shrubs to soils, grills and patio furniture.

In fact, it’s so big that Home Depot makes more money from its garden divisions than Hermès does from all of its luxury goods.

Flowers might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Home Depot, but they have grown to be essential for the company.

At the height of the pandemic, Americans splurged on home renovations, driving the company’s stock price upward. Since then, higher interest rates and housing prices have lowered demand for expensive projects. Even before the latest economic uncertainty, sales were flat or slightly down in most Home Depot divisions. Gardening is a bright spot.

It also helps explain how Home Depot is different from Walmart and Amazon. For those retail giants, holiday shopping is the most important time of the year. At this one, the most lucrative time of the year comes earlier.

“Home Depot’s big holiday is spring,” says Dan Stuppiello, who’s in charge of live goods at the company.

And spring at Home Depot really begins at spring trials.

One of the fundamental problems for any retailer is figuring out how to turn consumers into repeat customers. For Home Depot, spring trials are part of the solution. So I went to the plant expo.

“Right now, you’re in the present,” said Jennifar McComish, Home Depot’s head of live goods for the southern division. “But when you walk through those doors, that’s the future.”

Then the doors flung open.

Home Depot runs 25 trial gardens across the U.S. It unveils plants at an internal expo for suppliers.

Right, an executive at Proven Winners, a plant supplier, presents his company’s wares to the retail giant’s buyers.

BEN COHEN

When it comes to gardening, those of us who don’t know the difference between annuals and perennials have become used to failure.

Maybe we buy the wrong plant. Maybe we plant it at the wrong time. Maybe we feed it too much or don’t give it enough sun.

For any number of reasons, people come away from their experience in the garden believing they just don’t have a green thumb—and they don’t come back to Home Depot.

The only way to build their confidence and brand loyalty is to put all kinds of gardeners in position to succeed. That means making sure we buy the right plant at the right time and nurture it the right way.

“We have one purpose, and one purpose only,” McComish said. “We work with global breeders and regional growers to make sure we find plants so they have success in their gardens.”

To find those plants, Home Depot runs 25 trial gardens in nine climate zones across the U.S. and studies them in the field under a variety of conditions. After all, a plant that thrives in New Mexico might not survive in New Jersey. For security purposes, some of those experimental gardens are hidden in cornfields or through backyard donkey corrals, protected on secret farms before the plants are selected and patented.

Each year, the company vets roughly 800 genetic enhancements before 400 make it to the planting stage. As they monitor the trials, Home Depot and its partners focus on key attributes like disease resistance, drought tolerance and “flower power,” industry shorthand for color vibrancy and bloom size.

What they’re really trying to do is maximize your odds of a lush garden. They’re looking for the seeds of success.

At the end of the summer, they select between 40 and 50 plants for production. They come to spring trials to see the results.

This is not the way that Home Depot identified the products in more than 2,000 garden centers even a decade ago.

In the past, company representatives took buses up and down California to visit individual breeders separately. They would see one plant, then another, and they often wished they could go back and compare this geranium with that geranium. They decided there had to be a more efficient way of making decisions about the plants that Home Depot should carry.

So they reinvented the process and brought all of those breeders together under one roof. This year, they hosted spring trials near the company’s headquarters for the first time. Home Depot’s corporate managers still travel around the country for trade shows, scouting roses in Texas and visiting Florida during peak hydrangea season. But they rely on this centralized event to select the plants that millions of Americans will buy for their gardens.

The two-day show attracts the biggest names in breeding. They meet with growers and Home Depot representatives to brag about their new plants—new colors, new concepts or flower combinations, even new containers.

And almost everything that’s new in Home Depot’s garden centers this year appeared in spring trials over the past few years.

So what’s coming next?

When the doors opened into the future, I found myself surrounded by green—and shades of pink, yellow, blue and purple. Also, lots of Home Depot orange. I joined a group from the Midwest as spring trials began. It was time to get into the weeds.

“Tomorrow starts today,” said Dave Graham, who oversees live goods for the company’s northern division.

Our first stop was the exhibit of a breeder called Danziger, where Graham pulled me over to the Amore petunias. I can’t tell a petunia from a pansy, but even I could tell that they were striking—and that they were named Amore because every bloom had a pattern that looked like a heart. When Home Depot’s buyers saw them, they knew they had a Mother’s Day hit.

Then we made our way over to a collection of houseplants from Proven Winners and he pointed out a ficus.

“This was once upon a time a great plant,” he said.

That time was long ago. These days, ficuses aren’t exactly flying off Home Depot’s shelves.

“The reason that people don’t like them is that they drop leaves. If you look at it wrong, a leaf will fall off,” Graham said. “So how do you breed this plant so it has better foliage retention? And that’s where this plant right here came from,” he said. Naturally, it was called a Cling-On ficus.

There’s a similar tale of horticultural innovation in every corner of spring trials.

On one side were impatiens and begonias that only grew in the shade but now thrive in the sun, too. On the other side was a basil plant with greater leaf surface to produce better pesto.

And right in the middle of the room was a product that the company’s plant nerds were psyched for me to see.

“I’m going to show you one that’s going to blow your mind,” McComish promised.

This mind-blowing creation was the latest color of the SuperCal allweather petunia, the rare flower with a heat tolerance that makes it suitable for every U.S. climate. “A unicorn,” McComish said.

Sometimes, breeders follow the lead of Home Depot consumers. For example, hot peppers are huge these days, so there was an entire rack of increasingly hotter peppers at spring trials.

Other times, they take directions from Home Depot’s specialists. Every year, the company sends a design team to Paris Fashion Week to keep up with the latest color trends. It also tracks gardening behavior across Europe, which tends to be a few years ahead of America. After a brand of dianthus called Pink Kisses popped in Europe, it came to the U.S. and became a perfect Valentine’s Day gift. “There’s an advantage in being behind the curve,” Stuppiello says.

There’s also an advantage in being a total plant geek. At one point during spring trials, someone walked in and everyone went so completely nuts that I wondered if Taylor Swift had come to buy flowers. It turned out to be another celebrity: a legendary professor of horticulture who wrote the seminal “Manual of Woody Landscape Plants.”

The people who come to spring trials have seen everything, so they gravitate toward stuff they haven’t seen. They have to remind them--selves of that bias. Breeders love pink roses, but consumers just want their roses to be red.

After all, people who shop for plants at Home Depot don’t have degrees in horticulture. Graham doesn’t, either. He started at the company more than 30 years ago as a part-time garden associate to help pay for his business education. He’s been with Home Depot in the garden department ever since. His advice for customers is the same thing he tells new hires who know absolutely nothing about plants.

“Everything you need to know,” he says, “is right here on the tag.”

Those instructions are crucial because they increase the probability of Home Depot consumers feeling satisfied and returning to the garden center.

The company doesn’t have an issue finding gardening customers, but it does struggle to retain them. Some get so frustrated that they quit gardening. Others become so obsessed with gardening that they leave Home Depot for local nurseries and garden suppliers, where they’re willing to pay more and work with experts who know everything without having to read the tags.

As it happens, they both want the same thing: healthier plants and prettier flowers that are specifically bred to give them a better chance of success.

“At the end of the day,” Graham said, “it’s all about the success of the customer.”

And the end of this day at Home Depot could only mean one thing.

Spring was coming.

For other big retailers, the most important time of the year is the holiday season. At Home Depot, it’s spring.

The people who come to spring trials gravitate toward stuff they haven’t seen. But standbys like petunias remain customer favorites.

Amore petunias feature heart-shaped patterns on every bloom.