What is a Living Garden Basket?

Laura August 25, 2023 Customers, Products, Solutions

What is a Living Garden Basket?

At Pioneer, we don’t just wholesale quality items, we listen to our customers and create our own line of products to meet their specific needs. When customers can’t find a container that fits, a quality basic, an artificial flower that’s botanically correct or a particular color, we aim to fill that gap. Our goal is always to set designers up for success through both our products and our service.

For example, when we visited a florist customer, she explained to us that none of the baskets on the market were tall enough for her “living baskets.”

Potted plants arranged directly in a basket with some top dressing, these living plant arrangements became a highly profitable customer favorite, but our customer struggled to find a basket with dimensions that properly held common pot sizes. This was the advent of our European Garden Baskets, named after the small, manicured and deliberately planned gardens of Europe. This specific grouping of plants adds a certain value to the presentation.

After all, designers know that larger presentation means higher perceived value, and with this arrangement technique, a large presentation with low labor was a winning formula.

This once-regional design need is now exploding with opportunity and has climbed to one of our best-selling items. With container gardens and plant gifts growing in popularity, our exclusive basket dimensions make your design-life easier.

The original basket we designed holds four or five 6” potted plants below the rim of the basket allowing you to top the arrangement with moss, if need be, while ensuring a safe and balanced delivery. We have since expanded, still carrying this tapered rectangle basket but also oval and peanut-shaped baskets with this 6.75” depth.

Potted plants can fill a basket quickly and make a big impact! Five potted live plants that might retail for $40-$50 total, can now be sold as a single item for more than $100. Living garden baskets become a value-added gift for a memorial, housewarming, or various other purposes.

It’s a great way to introduce a new design to your staff (without intimidating them!) while also expanding your design offering. By keeping plants in their pots, you also eliminate the need for other mechanical basics. Consider the design opportunities in mixing varieties of flowering and green plants, compact succulents to dripping ivy. Perhaps consider filling the basket with pots of herbs for a beautiful and functional gift.

Just like a container garden makes maintenance easy, so too does a living basket win over consumers. Less maintenance, no weeding, and a controlled size is appealing to consumers, but the baskets are also customizable. Single pots can be swapped out if they are having maintenance issues or if customers want a seasonal flower in the mix.

Living garden baskets can also easily be moved from room-to room, even outdoors. Our heavy unpeeled willow basket is rustic with a high handle and the hardier, thicker weave provides a solid shape to sit on a porch or house flowers and plants on a doorstep. Make customers’ seasonal decorating easy by having a premade container ready for them to set and maintain easily.

The deeper basket dimension works great as a gift basket too. Items such as candles, mugs, jars and even food gifts get the security they need from the depth of the container.

As designers, we know you have the talent to transform the basket from its functional willow wicker to a true gift – you’re providing more than just merchandise. We are happy to deliver the tools you need to make that a reality. The occasions are endless for sending living garden baskets – from a message of condolence to a celebration.

Shop Living Garden Baskets Today!

A collaboration between writer Laura Vitale and Sarah Botchick of Pioneer.