Garden Centre Association and Colour your Life promote Green Community Awards

Environment and community got top billing at this year's GCA Conference. Speakers included Dr Tony Kendle, Foundation Director of the Eden Project who spoke about the essential link garden centres play between people and nature and the exciting opportunities this presents for communicating and engaging with garden centre visitors. Jonathon Porritt, Chief Executive of Forum for the Future used his presentation to confirm the need for garden centres to be proactive in their engagement with environmental issues.

The GCA Green Community Awards were also announced - The Gardens Group scooped the best of the best ‘Outstanding Commitment Award’ for 2009/10. Two years in a row now Mike and his team have shown that promoting the ‘real value’ of garden plants is at the core of their business. Through in-store displays, messages in customer communications and work with the local community, The Gardens Group successfully show customers that plants are one of the keys to bringing environmental and social benefits to our lives.

Qualifying centres get to use the Green Community Award logo to show visitors that they are local community champions working hard to bring real benefits to the community and the environment - this years qualifiers were:

Whitehall Garden Centre
All-In-One Garden Centre
Ayletts Nurseries
Grosvenor Garden Centre
Sunshine Garden Centre
Bents
The Millbrook Garden Company (2 centres)
Coolings Nurseries
The Gardens Group (3 centres)
Barton Grange Bolton

THE BIG OPPORTUNITY

PLUS! The GCA also used the opportunity to announce that for 2010 this award will be rebranding to benefit from the exciting new Colour your Life national campaign. This will maximise the benefits from these awards for GCA members as the stylish new branding will be recognised by and appeal to more mainstream consumers. Approx 300,000 Euro over the next 3 years will go into the Colour your Life nationwide dedicated consumer campaign that delivers tactical sales tools to retailers, top quality gardening images and information to the garden media and inspirational and practical information to consumers.

The newly named 'Colour your Life Green Community Award' is a real chance for garden centres to develop their business to be a garden centre of the future. It’s all aimed at showing the public all that plants do to improve our quality of life in every way.

www.colour-your-life.co.uk