Palmers Garden Centre Brand Guidelines: The Glen Eden Nursery That Became a Franchise Chain

A nursery on Great North Road.

Palmers traces its name to a plant nursery in Glen Eden, in West Auckland. The New Zealand Herald reported in April 2018 that the business stems from a nursery established in 1912 by Arthur William Palmer, and the company dates itself the same way: it says it has been “helping New Zealanders grow great gardens since 1912, starting as a nursery.”

The fullest account of the early years comes from the family. In an interview published on the Palmers website, Stanley Palmer, Arthur’s son, says his father grew up in Blickling, in Norfolk, came to New Zealand from England in 1908 and in 1912 bought a property on Great North Road, Glen Eden, much of it then in orchard, with glasshouses used for grapes. His father soon turned to plants in pots and annual seedlings in trays, Stanley Palmer says, and began delivering plants to shops in central Auckland by horse-drawn wagon; well into the 1940s, he says, supplying the city’s plant shops was a major part of the business.

The post-war building boom changed that, by his account. Demand from new suburban gardens grew so fast that customers crowded the nursery, and in 1958 the family built a retail department at the front of the site. Stanley Palmer says he travelled to California in 1965 to study garden retailing, came home with ideas from a self-service centre in Sepulveda, and, with an architect, designed a new self-service garden centre at Glen Eden, with automatic doors and several checkouts, which first opened in 1966.

From family firm to franchise.

Accounts differ on which date marks the first modern garden centre. The New Zealand Herald wrote in 2018 that the family established what was billed as the first “modern-style” garden centre in 1958, and BusinessDesk, the same year, cited the company website for the first modernised garden centre at Glen Eden in 1958. Stanley Palmer’s own account puts the retail department in 1958 and the self-service centre in 1966. Both dates belong to the same site.

The family business grew beyond Glen Eden in the following decade. Stanley Palmer says Palmers held an equal share in a garden centre with the Foodtown supermarket group at Papakura from about 1970, and bought the three retail stores of Australasian Nurseries, at Pakuranga, Mangere and Lynfield, around 1977. He says he took over from his father around 1965, and that he and his brother sold the business in 1981, when it had five stores.

After the family sale, the chain became a franchise system. The New Zealand Herald reported in 2018 that the franchising had passed through several changes of ownership and that since 2006 Palmers Franchise Systems had come under the umbrella of United Franchise Systems. It described more than a dozen centres run by individual franchisees across the North Island under three names: Palmers Garden Centre, Palmers Plantworld and Palmers Planet. At the Napier site, the paper said, the café, Café Botannix, ran as a separate franchise.

BusinessDesk reported in June 2018 that the existing shareholders, Geoffrey Macrae and Keith Routledge, had welcomed a new investor who took a 20 percent stake in Palmers Gardenworld Brands and Palmers Franchise Systems, and that United Franchise Systems was another company owned by the pair. At that time, it said, Palmers described itself as New Zealand’s foremost garden retail chain, with 14 North Island centres listed on its website.

Garden centres and their owners.

Garden-centre chains are retailers whose identity is read first from the road: a sign over a large site, repeated on carrier bags, catalogues, loyalty cards and websites. The chains in this series come from France, England, California, Ontario and New Zealand, and most of them publish their logos and colours on their own websites rather than in public brand manuals, so the palettes in these guides are our own interpretations.

Formats vary widely. At one end is the large out-of-town garden centre with plant halls, outdoor nursery areas and, where the company says it offers them, a café, a pet department and a Christmas shop. At the other are smaller town-centre plant shops: Truffaut, which French Wikipedia says opened a garden centre at Le Chesnay in 1964, opened an urban format at Boulogne-Billancourt in 2017.

Ownership is just as varied, and each guide states it as a dated fact. Some chains are family companies, such as Botanic, which Le Figaro described in 2017 as owned by its three founding families. Others belong to farmers’ cooperatives: Toute la Franchise wrote in 2016 that Gamm vert was the sign of the cooperative group InVivo. Others again have been owned by investment funds or listed groups, or have been sold, merged or closed, and their guides say plainly what happened and when.

The chains also present themselves through the calendar and through their own ranges: spring planting, summer outdoor living and Christmas each bring their own events, and many chains sell own-label products under names the companies choose themselves. Corporate pages on founders, owners and history complete the picture, and each guide marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A network of franchised centres.

Not every format has lasted. The Palmers Planet super-store had a patchy history, BusinessDesk wrote in 2018: the St James Palmers Planet in Hamilton went into liquidation along with its owner in 2015, and the franchisee of the flagship Palmers Planet at Albany also went into liquidation; in both cases, it reported, the franchisor bought back the premises and kept them trading. A larger Palmers Planet store at Petone, in Wellington, was then due to open in August 2018. In April 2018 the New Zealand Herald reported that the Napier centre on Taradale Road, opened about 20 years earlier, had closed suddenly, and that the closure did not involve other centres in the network.

The network has since become smaller. In September 2023 the New Zealand Herald, reporting the chain’s annual store-of-the-year award, described Palmers New Plymouth as one of 11 Palmers stores in New Zealand; the award was presented at the Palmers annual conference in Napier.

The company presents itself as a local business. It says it is “100% New Zealand owned and operated,” “locally owned and operated,” and that it is running a nationwide programme of franchised stores. It sells plants, potting mixes, garden tools and outdoor living goods in its centres and online, publishes how-to guides and a magazine, Palmers Edibles, and offers a guarantee it calls the Palmers Promise: if a plant fails to grow, the company says, it can be returned with proof of purchase within 12 months for a replacement. Stanley Palmer names the Palmers Manual, a gardening reference, as one of the things he is proudest of.

For a design guide, Palmers shows how a family nursery’s name can carry a franchise network of differently named formats. Compare Armstrong Garden Centers, a Californian chain, and Sheridan Nurseries, an Ontario grower of the same era. For this guide we use a punnet green, a fern green, cream and a terracotta with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Palmers Garden Centre’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.