What’s all this about?

Everyone would love a beautiful garden. Relax, entertain friends, play with the kids. But that dream’s out of reach for a lot of people. Particularly non-gardening home owners or people who don’t want to or simply can’t visit a garden centre.

So PickaPlant has used the Internet to bring the garden into everybody’s living room. It’s an exciting and amazingly easy way to choose the plants you need and have them delivered to your garden.

Virtual Gardening – from pick to plot

PickaPlant is a virtual gardening website. It’s designed to make selecting and getting your plants far easier and having much more fun doing it than anything that’s gone before. Here’s how it works.

When visitors arrive on the site they’re taken on a tour around a 3D, moving garden. A butterfly then appears guiding them to the types of plants available, such as trees, bushes, herbs, flowers, etc.

When the visitor spots the type of plant they want, they just click on it. They choose the height and a colour from a colour wheel. That’s it. No more questions. Just pick the plant from the ones presented and the plant is delivered to their garden.

About the PickaPlant site

We wanted PickaPlant to feature the very best in web design to make it incredibly easy to use, by applying the power of the Internet in a way no one has seen before. We took the latest 3D animation software that you’d normally see in state-of-the-art computer games or a design studio to create our virtual garden.

Adding the human touch, removing techno-clutter

PickaPlant technical designer Neil Robinson explains “We wanted to throw away all the “techiness” that so many sites suffer from. We wanted PickaPlant to be human-like. Wherever we could show an option rather than expect the visitor to type stuff in, we’d do it. We use an animated human figure to represent height, a colour wheel to indicate a colour choice.

We also wanted to eliminate the “website fatigue” so many sites suffer from, too. You can get what you want in three clicks. Type of plant, height, colour. Give us your details and the plant is picked, packaged and sent to you.

PickaPlant uses artificial intelligence to replicate high-street shopping. The site uses state-of-the-art “fuzzy logic” to behave like a good gardening expert would when offering choices, an important and key asset of our design.”

PickaPlant’s easy to use, but certainly not boring. There’s a lot available and visitors can go back to the garden as many times as they like. In fact we found that people spend a lot of time exploring.

The design allows ever-expanding choice and options, so returning visitors are always likely to find something new without losing their way because everything’s different from when they came last.

Creating a quality model

With PickaPlant, everything’s about quality. From the moment a visitor arrives, to the feeling they get when they receive their plant. At first, we were going to use a distribution network of existing garden centres around the UK. But this would see us lose control of the quality.

PickaPlant co-founder, Dr Graham Sutherland takes up the story, “For PickaPlant to work, we had to offer consistent high quality. We couldn’t allow someone in Argyle to have a lower quality experience than someone in Aylesbury. So we chose to supply everything ourselves, from one single point.”

PickaPlant then selected the highest quality plants available from a carefully managed garden nursery in the heart of Cheshire, one of the UK’s biggest plant growing and distribution areas.

eco-delivery

We designed eco-friendly packaging with a high plant density, reducing waste. We make sure the packages are strong so waste from damaged goods and repeated delivery journeys is minimised. Our plants are for gardens, so that’s where we deliver them to. We don’t expect our visitors to have to sign for the plants and risk having their plants die and fuel wasted when we can’t deliver.

The packages are fully recyclable so after use, they can be put back into the production cycle. All in all, PickaPlant’s an end to end, eco-friendly, high-quality model.

Saving time, saving energy, saving the Planet

It’s estimated that trips to a garden centre represent a carbon footprint of 120,000 tonnes of CO2 annually. That’s the equivalent of 365,000 return trips to Stockholm from London every year.

PickaPlant’s designers have the last word and joked “We even hope to recycle our visitors – we hope they’ll come back to use us time and time again!”

About the founders of PickaPlant

PickaPlant came about as a result of sitting in a traffic jam on the way to a business meeting. The two founders, Graham Sutherland of Chester and Congleton-based Neil Robinson looked at all the gardens of the houses they passed and wondered how everyone chose what went in them.

They realised that so many people were expected to know about gardening just because they’d bought a house. Having struggled themselves, they decided there had to be an easier way.

They decided to create a partnership, Genis LLP to create the PickaPlant brand and then launch other ideas as separate entities in the future.