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Last week was a busy one for us at Burgon & Ball, as we headed to Birmingham’s NEC to exhibit at GLEE, the UK’s biggest garden and outdoor leisure trade exhibition.
It’s a key event in the calendar for us, and one we wouldn’t dream of missing. It’s where we unveil all the top-secret new products we’ve been working on all year, which (hopefully!) you’ll start to see in a garden centre near you before too long.
Lovely as it is to be able to cast aside our metaphorical cloak and dagger, and bring our clever new tools and gorgeous gardening gifts into the spotlight, it’s just as much of a pleasure to walk around the trade show. Imagine the biggest garden centre you’ve ever seen, filled with the most beautiful plants, tools, garden accessories and gifts. It’s a wonderful Aladdin’s cave, and a great inspiration.
At Burgon & Ball we're keen to create tools and accessories to solve real problems for real gardeners, and we always try to put that little bit more thought into our new products. We find that looking at how people live, work, and garden today helps us to keep ahead of the curve, ready to solve the problems of tomorrow - before they even crop up!
So we thought we’d bring you a couple of the top trends which seemed to be everywhere at the show.
Going green
Efforts to improve sustainability were everywhere at the show. Reduced packaging, wooden or metal alternatives to plastic products, peat reduction, organic seeds and fertilizers, wildlife-friendly pest prevention… new developments in response to gardeners’ keenness to ‘green up’ were in evidence all round the show - including our two new weeding tools, which will help gardeners go chemical-free.
One initiative we particularly noticed was the new taupe plant pot, which is in the process of being introduced and will be seen containing plants in your local garden centre in the not-too-distant future.
The new taupe-coloured pot is carbon-free, recycled polypropylene that can be identified by the machinery used in domestic recycling schemes. This means that it can easily be, recycled through kerbside recycling schemes, allowing gardeners to dispose of their pots to be recycled in a way that has not been possible before now. And that has to be a good thing.
Houseplant obsession
Houseplants, houseplants, everywhere. It cannot have escaped your notice that houseplants are, as they say, having ‘a bit of a moment’. It’s fair to say, they’re the most popular they’ve been in a generation – and across the UK, we just cannot get enough of them. Fuelled by inspirational images on Instagram, and no doubt helped along by urban living and people who rent their home, houseplants are especially enjoying popularity among younger indoor gardeners, perhaps decorating their first or second home. Houseplants are no longer simply plants – they’ve become a design statement.
And at GLEE we were treated to terrariums, pots, tools, specialist compost, accessories, hangers, misters, food, fertilizer, and of course lot and lots of lush and leafy loveliness. Acres of green. And we simply loved it!
Happily, the new products we launched at the show proved to be ahead of the curve. Not only have we introduced some gorgeous new indoor pots to hold your prized plants, we also have a new collection of houseplant care tools, so even indoor gardeners new to keeping houseplants can have happy, healthy plants. And in terms of eco-gardening, we launched two brilliant new weeding tools to make short work of weeds all round the garden, without any chemicals, so gardens can stay safe for children, pets and wildlife.
Of course, we launched much more besides; over 30 new products in total. So watch this space – it won’t be long before you’ll be seeing them featured in this Journal!
