Gardening and the Internet? No, the concept just didn't seem like a feasible idea - until the man who brought gardening to the Irish public by every other means over the last 20 years, Gerry Daly, explained it.
According to Daly, all gardeners have a fundamental attribute that is essential to success in both disciplines. In a word - patience. Gardening, like building a successful website, is an organic process. Plant it and it will grow. Build it and they will come. This is his philosophy, and his recently launched website, Garden.ie has set out to test that reasoning.
Live since March this year, the website hosts a range of information services for its 1,600 registered users, including chat rooms for beginning and advanced gardeners, a week-by-week guide to garden maintenance, answers to common gardening queries and a daily weather report from Met ╔ireann.
Catering for both the avidly green-fingered to the more recently inspired, the site is easy to get around, avoids clutter and reaches the needs of gardeners at all levels.
But considering the fact that the average Web user is between 20 and 40 years of age, is Garden.ie reaching the right people? Daly believes so. His theory is that the Internet and gardeners alike have a life cycle through which they must develop. The Internet is merely in its infancy, he says, and has yet to reach its full potential.
As Daly sees it, the true, "active" gardener only realises his/her full potential after passing a number of stages, from childhood onwards.
Children, he says, have a strong interest in nature and the garden, which is largely lost during adolescence. This interest then returns at a practical level to those in their late 20s/early 30s - the house buyers and young families.
The majority of this group is what he calls the "reluctant" gardener: people who want quick answers and practical help with their new garden. And it is only around retirement age - when people have time and money on their hands - that they reach their full gardening potential.
Daly predicts the house-buying and web-using category will form his website's future stronghold. "It's interesting that, as time goes on, the market for a gardening website has to grow because the present 20-40 web generation will, in the life cycle of a gardener, become gardeners. Already being web-aware, they'll use the web and they'll use the gardening facilities on the web," he says.
But insofar as he expects his website to develop as an e-business in the future, he is aware that the Internet medium will also have to grow into its boots. In order for this to happen, he believes Web access must spread to all Irish garden owners and can only be achieved once the cost of accessing the Web decreases and connection speed of it increases.
"The public hasn't really, in huge numbers, begun to use the Web yet. People are using it extensively, and it's very impressive what it has achieved in 10 years. But it's only tiny compared with the way people will use it, I think, in the future," he says.
This awareness is also evident in what Gerry calls his "survival strategy" - something he says is essential for the success of any Internet business. And so, despite going live at perhaps the most precarious period of the Internet's development - when online businesses are collapsing globally at a phenomenal rate, he remains unphased.
Although there are a "vast amount" of gardening websites on the Internet, with Garden.ie leading the charge in Ireland, Gerry likes to compare his website's prospects with that of garden.com - the US giant that has recently crashed, taking its investors' $150 million down with it.
"It might seem strange for a minnow to say 'they got it wrong', but they did get it wrong," says Gerry.
The company attempted to sell plants online, and it was this commercialism that was their undoing, he believes. People have widely varying taste, he says, not to mention the fact that plants are perishable and a "nightmare" to deliver. "It wasn't a runner in gardening," he insists.
So, Garden.ie has decided to start small (the site averages 200 page impressions per day) and concentrate on disseminating information and acting as a conduit to other gardening information sources.
Gerry himself, his business partner and a number of site developers constitute the entire team behind garden.ie. In its infancy, the site doesn't require any more input than that, he says. But as demand for the information and services it provides increases, so too will the operation.
"I think that's one of the mistakes that some websites have made - they've built too big of a shop, and there's not enough customers," he says.
Daly's survival plan is to supply after the demand. For instance, Daly's online answering service will, in time, become an archived source, and the 350 garden centres currently listed on the site will also have the opportunity to buy extended advertising space - essentially becoming "sitelets" in their own right.
But isn't it fair to say that Daly's reputation as Ireland's gardening guru may be an equally vital element of Garden.ie's survival? "In a way, I have the advantage insofar as I'm a full-time gardening information person - that's my business," he explains. But he doesn't expect his relative fame to save his website should trouble find it.
"The way I see it is that I've been over 20 years in the information business in the other media - radio, television, books, newspapers, magazines. But this is just a superb new medium with its own strengths and its own weaknesses."
www.garden.ie
cmulvey@irish-times.com