How To Start a Gardening Business in 9 Essential Steps

Starting a gardening business can turn your passion for plants into a profitable venture. With the global lawn and garden market projected to generate $360 billion in revenue in 2025, there’s never been a better time to transform your green thumb into a thriving business.

Whether you dream of designing stunning landscapes, maintaining beautiful gardens, or selling plants to fellow gardening enthusiasts, starting a gardening business lets you spend time in nature while building something meaningful. The path from passion to profit involves strategic planning, from understanding your local market to investing in the right equipment and marketing your services to potential clients.

Types of gardening businesses 

Here are some of the main services you could offer with your own gardening business:

• Garden consulting. Gardening businesses can offer consulting services to paying clients, providing expertise and advice about how to achieve their goals in the garden. 

• Garden design. A gardening business can also specialize in garden design, drawing up plans that determine plant selection and placement in a client’s garden.

• Garden installation. This involves preparing soil, raising beds, installing trellises, sowing seeds, and transplanting mature plants into a garden. 

• Garden maintenance. Gardening businesses can offer ongoing maintenance services like watering and pruning plants, mowing lawns, removing weeds, controlling pests, and fertilizing soil.

• Plant nursery/garden center. Grow seeds into plants and sell them to customers for their own gardening projects from a physical location.

• Garden supplies. Sell garden products like seeds, planters, raised beds, and tools like pruners and rakes. Epic Gardening successfully leveraged its educational blog audience to launch an ecommerce store selling gardening products.

How to start a gardening business

1. Develop your gardening skills
2. Perform market research
3. Write a gardening business plan
4. Choose a business structure
5. Obtain registration and licenses
6. Open a bank account and select insurance
7. Buy gardening equipment and supplies
8. Create a website for your gardening business
9. Market your business to find new clients

Starting a gardening business means you can spend time outdoors and be your own boss—but it takes dedication and hard work on projects that can fluctuate seasonally depending on where you operate. Here’s how to get started: 

1. Develop your gardening skills

You need hands-on experience in various gardening environments before launching your own business. Gardening is a regional-specific practice that changes with the seasons, and it can take years to learn the necessary skills to design, install, and maintain a flourishing garden space.

Get experience by working with professional gardeners, landscaping companies, or garden centers in your local area. Get as much hands-on experience as possible to sharpen your skills and understand what future clients will need—even if your goal is opening a retail gardening store.

This is how the team at Epic Gardening stays in touch with the needs of its customer base. On an episode of the Shopify Masters podcast, founder and CEO Kevin Espiritu talks about the importance of regular gardening at the company, saying, “We’re in the garden daily growing stuff, and so we’re very plugged in seasonally to what’s going on, at least in our climate.”

Team members at Epic Gardening use their gardening experiences to understand their audience’s current needs by asking questions like:

• What gardening tasks are we focused on right now? 

• What chores do we have to do in the garden? 

• What problems are we dealing with?

These insights help them tailor their content marketing effectively.

2. Perform market research

Research the market where you plan to offer gardening services or sell products. Make a list of nearby gardening businesses, read online reviews, check websites, and explore platforms like Thumbtack, Taskrabbit, and Angi to see which services are in demand.

Ask yourself key questions:

• How many gardening businesses operate in your area? 

• What is the split between commercial and residential clients paying for gardening services? 

• What types of plants are most popular? (For US-based businesses, use resources like the USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map to understand which types of plants thrive in your region.)

Look for niche opportunities with limited competition. Your market research might reveal unmet needs—perhaps demand for hydroponic gardens or rock gardens with hardy plants like succulents—that you can specialize in to stand out from competitors.

3. Write a gardening business plan

Write a business plan that covers your gardening business’s goals. You can start with a business plan template and complete these essential sections:

• Executive summary. Write a one-page overview describing your objectives, launch plan, and professional gardening background. 

• Company overview. Detail how your gardening business will operate, including your mission statement, structure, size, and focus. 

• Products or services offered. Specify what gardening services or products you’ll provide, such as garden bed installation or seed selling. 

• Market analysis. Include your market research findings. Explain how your gardening business will differentiate itself through unique value propositions like competitive pricing or specialized gardening services that no other local business offers.

• Marketing plan. Develop your marketing strategy for generating new clients and customers. Determine which marketing channels deserve your investment—paid ads, physical flyers, or other approaches. Define your pricing strategy.

• Logistics and operations plan. Explain how your business will handle service delivery logistics and operations, including equipment needs and transportation.

• Financial plan. Include financial projections like startup costs and ongoing business expenses, plus your funding strategy—such as applying for a Small Business Administration (SBA) loan.

4. Choose a business structure

Establish your new business by selecting the right business structure. Sole proprietorships and general partnerships are unincorporated entities, meaning that there’s no legal distinction between the owner and the business. Without this distinction, owner(s) are personally responsible for the business’s losses, debts, and liabilities.

Limited liability companies (LLCs) and corporations both provide liability protection. LLCs are simpler to form than corporations, though corporations can raise capital by selling shares. Consider consulting an attorney or tax professional when making this decision.

5. Obtain registration and licenses

Register your business with your state and obtain a business license from your town, city, or county. Research additional licenses you might need for your specific gardening business. For example, you may need a commercial applicator license for pesticide use or a contractor’s license for installing retaining walls, depending on local regulations. Some regions also require nursery licenses for growing and selling plants.

6. Open a bank account and select insurance

Open a dedicated business bank account and decide which insurance company to use for general liability insurance, which protects your business against property damage or injury while providing gardening services. Research other types of insurance that you might need based on your business size, including commercial auto insurance for your work vehicle and workers’ compensation insurance if you plan to hire employees.

7. Buy gardening equipment and supplies

Invest in equipment for your gardening business. While you can start with some personal tools to control costs, you’ll likely need commercial-grade equipment to provide professional services. Here are some of the most common gardening tools and supplies to consider buying for your business:

• Shovels

• Rakes

• Garden forks

• Hedge shears 

• Garden spades

• Hedge trimmer

• Wheelbarrow

• Garden hoes

• Safety gear like gloves and goggles

• Hand pruner

• Seeds

• Soil amendments (to improve the quality of soil for growing plants)

• Watering cans

• Lawn mowers

• Leaf blowers

8. Create a website for your gardening business

Create a professional website where clients can book gardening appointments or purchase products. Use a reliable ecommerce platform like Shopify, which offers templates for easy website design and features the world’s best-converting checkout. Find an appointment booking app designed to integrate with your website, allowing clients to schedule around your availability.

9. Market your business to find new clients

Execute the marketing strategy from your business plan, focusing on your local service area. Create flyers, brochures, and business cards featuring your business name, services offered, and contact details for bookings, including your website URL or a QR code.

To find clients online, prioritize local SEO strategies to improve your search engine rankings for area-specific queries. Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile with relevant service information, pricing breakdowns, and photos of your garden work. List your business on platforms like Taskrabbit, Yelp, and Facebook Marketplace.

Content marketing offers another powerful client attraction method. Start a blog with helpful gardening tips and advice for different garden types, or create video content about gardening for social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Create valuable content that organically promotes your gardening company and directs potential clients to your website. Kevin Espiritu kept Epic Gardening’s blog growing by building a team of writers with different knowledge bases and hiring a garden expert for content review. “We pick the right writer for the right topic, but then we also have all articles pass through what we call a ‘hort review,’” he says. “Our horticulturist will look at it, check it for accuracy, and make sure that everything that’s written is actually accurate to the particular species or the care guide that particular plant needs.”

Your target market likely values recommendations from friends, neighbors, and family members. As you build your client base, offer referral discounts for anyone who shares your contact information with people in their network—word-of-mouth marketing can significantly boost a gardening business.

*Shopify Capital loans must be paid in full within a maximum of 18 months, and two minimum payments apply within the first two six-month periods. The actual duration may be less than 18 months based on sales.