Bents wins new Colour your Life Award – plus two others at GCA conference this week!

Matthew Bent, Managing Director of Bents Garden & Home at Warrington, received the first Colour your Life Green Community Award at the Garden Centre Association conference at Heythrop Park near Oxford this week.

Matthew Bent commented: “We’ve long been committed to initiatives which help the environment and our local surroundings and are delighted our efforts have been acknowledged with the prestigious ‘Colour Your Life’ award. We introduced our 5 Green Footprints several years ago, but over the past 12 months we have really focussed on ways in which we communicate these messages to our customers and the award is a great recognition of our efforts.
“We have also introduced a number of new ‘Green’ initiatives including our Green Crusader; a new superhero who we are hoping will really engage with children and get them enthusiastic about their surroundings. Our Green Crusader will become more prominent over the next 12 months during which we hope to build on our ‘Colour Your Life’ status. ”

Putting plants at the core of their green and community activities helped them to achieve high scores in each of the criteria categories. Bents make gardening accessible to new customers with great ideas. The company’s creation of a three mile nature ramble to the rear of the centre is a fantastic example of enabling children and families to experience ‘real’ nature as part of their garden centre visit. Recruiting support and raising funds for Marie Curie’s Local Nursing Services, plus the ‘Ready Steady Dig’ initiative to involve local primary school children in gardening all won high marks. Bents use of Twitter and Facebook to reinforce these key messages is particularly effective.

Bents also walked away with the award for Destination Garden Centre of the year and the GIMA Product Award. It will have been a happy journey back to Warrington on Wednesday!

Runners up this year, both with very strong entries too, were Grosvenor Garden Centre, Chester (second place), and The Gardens Group, Dorset (a close third). It should be noted that the quality of this year’s entries was very strong indeed and identifying the leaders from those at the head of the pack was a real test of even our experienced judges!

Grosvenor places sustainability at the core of its strategic plan and the highly motivated and engaged team take every opportunity to communicate the ‘real’ value of plants for our health and well being. 2010 was also a year of increased involvement in the community through local groups, charities and forward-thinking projects. Grosvenor’s PR and marketing activities are fully aligned with their Colour your Life activities. Interestingly they note sales increases of vegetable plants by 17%, fruit trees 44% and growing equipment 93%, all of which they take as direct evidence of the effectiveness of their ‘Sow it, Grow it, Eat it’ campaign – itself a strand of their Colour your Life Award entry.

The Gardens Group, Dorset were winners of the Green City Town & Country Award, forerunner of the Colour your Life Award, for the last two years and it was really a photo-finish between the three top-scorers this year. The Gardens Group has a fantastic programme of community activities, including ‘The Green Shed’ initiative which makes a real difference every day for adults with learning difficulties in their area, as well as contributing to increasing the environmental sustainability of the garden centre operation. In-store, the team leads in providing clear, accessible information for newcomers to gardening. ‘How to’ information is conspicuous and attractively presented; other POS brings out the broader benefits of plants clearly and simply.

The Colour your Life Green Community Award is run in conjunction with the Garden Centre Association and the UK Green Forum. It links in with the EU supported Colour your Life generic plant promotional campaign run by Plant Publicity Holland in the UK. It provides a valuable business tool for enhancing garden centre operations in relation to their social and environmental activities. Participants report direct business benefits from their involvement. It is open to all Garden Centre Association members and is free of charge to enter.

For more information, go on-line at www.colour-your-life.co.uk or email Mark Long (Director, UK Green Forum and Colour your Life co-ordinator) on contact@colour-your-life.co.uk