association comment


It’s that time of year again GCA chairman Mike Lind looks ahead to the organisation’s plans for 2020


The yuletide period is a huge footfall driver for all garden centres and our increasingly popular annual Christmas Competition was taken very seriously by our members, who used it for effective PR purposes, and to ensure they give their customers the very best festive experience possible.


Putting Christmas aside, here at GCA HQ we’re looking ahead to the coming year, which brings with it our annual conference. It takes place at the Mercure Bristol, Grand Hotel,


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Bristol, UK, which is a historic grade II listed building in the city centre. It takes place from 26-29 January 2020.


The conference will kick off with our annual Greenfingers event, where retailers and suppliers will be competing for the Greenfingers Challenge Trophy and raising money for the charity. This year, to celebrate 10 years since the first rugby challenge, we return to the field, but this time for a game of ‘touch rugby’, so everyone can get involved. Our 2020 conference has an environmental


theme and we will look into the issues that face us as an industry and as a country. We’ve already announced environmentalist


Trewin Restorick as one of our speakers during the event. He will be speaking about corporate social responsibility, behavioural change to the combat climate crisis, green living and charity and business partnerships. We think he will be a real inspiration to our members and help them to think more about the issues we’re facing.


• Places can be booked via www.gca.org.uk. GCU December/January 2020


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