2021 Garden Research Cover Contest

Thank you for your interest in our Garden Research Cover contest!

Each year the National Gardening Association creates a series of in-depth research reports that we offer as a product to companies who wish to track the business of gardening in the United States. It is a fairly prestigious annual report that is used by a good number of large businesses and financial institutions and is widely cited by the media. When you hear statistics about how many people in the US engage in gardening, those numbers usually originated from our survey reports. We conduct our surveys through Dynata in collaboration with the University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

This year for the first time, we are opening up a contest to allow members to contribute photos for consideration to be used for the cover page of the survey!

Here is what some of our past reports looked like:



This year we are producing two reports, and thus we need two photos

The first report is our annual National Gardening Survey and will cover all the trends and activities of gardeners last year. The main topic is covid, of course, and its impact on the American gardening activities. We saw a huge increase in gardeners last year, especially in food gardening and houseplants. We'd like the cover to reflect either vegetable gardening, houseplants, or both. We'd also like it to somehow convey a positive sense of the gardening during lockdowns that we all experienced last year.

Our second report is called "What Gardeners Think" and it looks at the thoughts and motives behind peoples' decision to garden. We ask and get answers to a lot of questions like "Why did you garden for the first time last year?" and "What changes in your life would prompt you to garden even more this year?" and stuff like that. We'd like the cover of this one to be either a generic beautiful gardening scene, or else a garden-related scene that involves people having fun enjoying their gardens.

So, please submit your photos for consideration. Choose which survey you want to submit the photo into, and you can submit up to 10 photos in each category. You have until the evening of March 14th to enter. After that, we will open this for a community vote, but
the final determination as to which photo we use will be ours. The highest voted photos may not be the ones we select as the official winners.

The contributors of the two photos that we select to use will be given $50 each and their names will be credited on the credits page of the reports, and they will also each be given an exclusive Garden Research Contributor microbadge (shown at the right) for their Garden.org profile. If the same person submits both winning photos, they will get the full $100. We will need a signed permission sheet for this purpose.

We will need the photos in full resolution, so please do not resize them before posting them here.

Select a category below to submit your photos.