From Stickers to Signposts: The Next Stage of the Native Plant Guide at Primex
When we first introduced The Mediocre Gardener’s Native Plant Guide idea at Primex Garden Center, the idea was simple: put stickers directly onto native plants so shoppers could immediately understand what each plant might do in their garden. A Pollinator Pit Stop offered nectar and pollen for bees, butterflies and hummingbirds. A Caterpillar Café fed baby butterflies and moths. A Bird Buffet provided seeds, berries, insects or shelter for birds. And a Stormwater Sponge helped soak up rain and slow runoff. The stickers acted like tiny, silent salespeople.
They gave plants a reason to be chosen beyond flower color, height or bloom time. A customer might not recognize milkweed by name, but “Caterpillar Café” quickly explained why it mattered. Someone looking at an aster could immediately understand that it offered late-season food for pollinators. That part worked, but the challenge was keeping up with the plants.
Why we stopped putting stickers on individual pots
At a busy garden center, plants move quickly. Some varieties arrive in large quantities and sell through almost immediately. Others are shifted between benches as displays change and new deliveries come in. Applying stickers to individual pots required someone to identify the right plants, match each one with the correct sticker and physically attach every sticker. By the time one shipment had been labeled, some of the plants could already be heading out the door.
The stickers were useful for customers, but the process was too time-consuming to be practical at scale and that is exactly what a pilot is supposed to reveal. The goal was never simply to cover pots in stickers. The goal was to find a clear, repeatable way to help people understand native plants and feel more confident buying them. So we started asking a different question:
What if the signs could guide people through the garden center, rather than trying to label every individual plant?
Turning the signs into a wayfinding system
The latest version of the pilot uses larger signs placed among groups of native plants.Instead of searching for a small sticker on a pot, shoppers can now spot a sign from farther away and use it to understand the section around them.
A caterpillar cafe plant by a pollinator pit stop. Two plants that can support a monarch from caterpillar to butterfly.
A milkweed sign identifies a Caterpillar Café plant. An aster sign highlights a Pollinator Pit Stop. Another sign introduces heliopsis as a native plant and helps it stand out among a busy display. The signs are designed to do several jobs at once:
Confirm that the plant is native.
Explain one of its roles for nature.
Help shoppers navigate a large and sometimes overwhelming plant selection.
Encourage customers to combine plants that support wildlife in different ways.
The larger introductory sign asks:
What kind of garden would you like?
It then explains the four icons and invites shoppers to start with one idea or mix and match them.
The main sign introduces the Bird Buffet, Pollinator Pit Stop, Caterpillar Café and Stormwater Sponge icons, helping customers build a garden around the benefits they want to provide.
That means someone could choose a milkweed and an aster together: one plant to feed monarch caterpillars and another to provide nectar for adult butterflies. Suddenly, the shopper is not simply buying two attractive plants. They are beginning to build a garden that can support a monarch from caterpillar to butterfly and that connection is the heart of the project.
Helping customers make different shopping choices
Most plant labels are built around care instructions: sun, soil, water, size and bloom time. That information matters, but it does not always answer the question many people are beginning to ask: What will this plant contribute to my garden?
The new signs make those benefits visible at the moment when someone is deciding what to buy. They may encourage a customer to choose a native plant over a non-native alternative. They may help someone add a host plant instead of selecting only nectar plants. They may draw attention to a plant that is less showy in the pot but incredibly valuable once it is in the ground. In that sense, the signs are still silent salespeople, they are simply working from a better position. Instead of being attached to every individual pot, they now act as signposts—helping shoppers find native plants, understand their value and imagine how several plants might work together at home.
Still a work in progress
This latest version is another step in the experiment, not necessarily the final answer. We are continuing to learn where the signs should be placed, how large they need to be, which information shoppers notice first and whether the QR codes lead people to learn more after they leave the garden center. But the direction feels promising.
The stickers showed that simple language could help people see plants differently. The new wayfinding signs are testing whether that same language can work more efficiently across an entire garden center. Because native plant shopping should not require a botany degree, hours of research or a perfectly planned landscape. Sometimes, you simply need a sign that points you toward a plant—and tells you why it matters.
