Untold Hours: The Great Garden Centre Mystery

Welcome back to Untold Hours, the place where I share a little more about what’s happening behind the scenes in my world as The Children’s Gardening Coach. This is the space where I talk about the work that doesn’t always make it onto social media. The planning, the conversations, the ideas that turn into projects, and the partnerships that help bring children and families closer to gardening.

Over the past few weeks, one of the projects I’ve been working on with the Horticultural Trades Association (HTA) is something called the Great Garden Centre Mystery, which we recently launched to garden centres across the UK as part of National Children’s Gardening Week happening later in the year.

At its heart, the project is very simple. It’s about encouraging families to visit their local garden centre together and explore it in a fun and interactive way. But behind that simple idea is something I feel very strongly about. Garden centres have the potential to be so much more than places where people simply buy plants. They can be places where families connect with nature, learn together and create lasting memories.

One of the things I’m always trying to do in my work is bring children, families and garden centres closer together. Garden centres are full of knowledge and inspiration. The staff working there often have decades of experience with plants, growing and gardening. They know which plants thrive in certain spaces, what works well in different types of gardens and how people can get started if they’re completely new to growing.

For a child walking through a garden centre, it can be an incredible learning experience without even realising it. They see colours, textures, insects, seeds and tools. They hear conversations about growing and caring for plants. They start to ask questions. And those questions often spark curiosity that can lead to a lifelong love of gardening.

But garden centres are not just about plants. They’re about time spent together.

I’ve experienced this myself with my own daughter. Some of our most relaxed and enjoyable days together have started with a simple trip to the garden centre. We might wander around looking at plants, chatting about what we could grow at home. We might stop for a cup of tea and a chocolate brownie in the café. Then we head home with a few plants or seeds and spend the afternoon planting them together.

Those moments might seem small, but they are powerful. They are the moments where memories are made. A simple visit to a garden centre can easily become a whole day of shared experiences, learning and laughter.

That’s exactly the type of experience we wanted to encourage with the Great Garden Centre Mystery.

The idea behind the mystery is to create a fun journey for children and families as they move around the garden centre. Instead of simply walking through the space, they follow clues, explore different sections and interact with what they see along the way. It turns a normal visit into a small adventure.

The mystery encourages parents and children to talk to each other about what they are seeing. It prompts questions and sparks curiosity. It invites children to notice the plants around them and engage with the space in a different way.

And of course, there is also a little extra incentive.

Visitors who take part in May in the Great Garden Centre Mystery will have the chance to win a £250 National Gardening Gift Card, provided by the HTA. It’s a great prize, but more importantly it gives families another reason to take part and explore their local garden centre together.

For me, as National Children’s Gardening Week Ambassador, projects like this are exactly the kind of thing I love working on. National Children’s Gardening Week has always been about encouraging more children to connect with nature, to grow something themselves and to experience the joy of gardening. But it’s also about supporting the places that make those experiences possible.

Garden centres are an incredibly important part of that.

They are community spaces. They are learning spaces. They are places where knowledge is passed on from one generation to the next. And in a world where so many children spend more time indoors and on screens, places like garden centres offer something genuinely different.

They offer real-world experiences.

While filming the content for this year’s Great Garden Centre Mystery and working on the design of the campaign assets, I could really see how the project would work in practice. As we put the materials together, it became clear how easily this could spark conversations between parents and children.

A clue about bees might lead to a conversation about pollinators.
A question about herbs might lead to smelling different plants.
A stop near the pots might lead to talking about how plants grow.

These small interactions are incredibly valuable. They create curiosity. They encourage children to look more closely at the world around them. And they remind parents how easy it can be to introduce gardening into everyday family life.

Perhaps most importantly, they help strengthen the community role that garden centres can play.

A good garden centre isn’t just a retail space. It’s a meeting place. It’s somewhere families go together. Somewhere grandparents bring grandchildren. Somewhere parents introduce children to the joy of growing their own plants.

The Great Garden Centre Mystery taps into that idea. It gives families a reason to explore together and turns a visit into something memorable.

Behind the scenes, there’s a lot of work that goes into creating projects like this. There are discussions about how the activity will work in different garden centres, how the assets will be used, how the messaging encourages participation and how we keep it fun and accessible for families.

But when it all comes together, the aim is simple.

We want more children walking through garden centres.
We want more families talking about plants.
And we want more people leaving with a sense of excitement about growing something at home.

Because sometimes the most powerful thing we can do to inspire the next generation of gardeners is simply create the opportunity for them to explore.

And that opportunity might just begin with a mystery waiting to be solved at their local garden centre.