The brief

Gardening Express is one of the UK’s leading online garden retailers — a business with genuine horticultural expertise, a passionate customer base and a founder, Chris Bonnett, who had spent his life around plants. When Motive began working with them in 2019, the brand was well known within the gardening world but not yet the kind of national name that journalists naturally called when they needed an expert voice on all things garden.

The brief was straightforward in concept but demanding in execution: build the kind of sustained editorial presence that would turn Gardening Express from a well-regarded garden retailer into the definitive expert voice in the UK gardening media. Not just coverage — authority.

The approach

Chris Bonnett is a trained horticulturist who genuinely knows everything there is to know about plants. That expertise is the most valuable asset a PR agency can work with — not a product, not a campaign idea, but a real human being with genuine knowledge that journalists need.

We developed a sustained programme of expert-led content built around Chris’s horticultural expertise. Seasonal planting guides, trend commentary, advice on dealing with garden pests and plant diseases, tips on making a garden look expensive on a budget — the kind of practical, genuinely useful content that home and garden editors want to publish. We pitched Chris consistently and systematically to the publications that matter: the weekend gardening supplements, the home and lifestyle titles, the regional press covering seasonal gardening stories.

In parallel, we supported the business through the remarkable period of the pandemic and lockdowns — when the UK’s sudden, intense interest in gardens and outdoor spaces created an extraordinary media opportunity that required fast, consistent, reactive pitching. Gardening Express was perfectly positioned as the expert voice for a nation that had suddenly discovered its garden.

We also developed news-led story angles beyond the purely horticultural — trend data on what plants were selling, research into Britain’s most and least green-fingered regions, commentary on RHS Chelsea announcements and wider gardening culture stories that gave national news journalists a reason to feature Chris alongside the specialist press.

The result that says everything

Over four years from 2019 to 2022, Motive delivered 4,014 items of coverage — an average of more than 1,000 items per year, sustained consistently through changing seasons and a global pandemic. Chris appeared in The Sun, the Sunday Times, the Financial Times, Hello Magazine, Huffington Post, Ideal Home, Real Homes, Homes & Gardens, Love Property, Woman & Home, Metro and Mirror Online among many others.

But the result that best captures what this campaign achieved isn’t a coverage number. It’s the fact that our sustained expert positioning work earned Chris Bonnett a weekly gardening column in the Daily Express — one of the UK’s biggest-selling national newspapers. A standing platform in national press, secured through years of consistent media presence, is the kind of outcome that transforms not just a PR campaign but a brand’s relationship with the media forever.

Chris is now also regularly featured as a gardening expert in The Sun, and contributes expert commentary to Gardening Etc, Real Homes and a range of other titles. The editorial identity built over years of sustained PR has created a media presence that continues to deliver long after individual campaigns have ended.