JAMES Boyle (pictured) literally has an eye for business.

It served him well when he was driving along the A48 outside Chepstow earlier this year and saw a sign for a garden centre to let.

Built speculatively at Pwllmeyric by local construction firm Bob Bailey, it seemed like an ideal place for Mr Boyle to add another centre to the one he has been running successfully for five years in Gloucester.

The well-attended opening ceremony last month at his Chepstow Garden Centre vindicated him in his view that the growing town of Chepstow and its environs would provide him with a keen customer base.

"What drew me to the site was its potential," he said. "There was no roof on the building at the time and it was just framework, but I realised that there was nothing like it in the area. I spent a day driving around and visiting all the local competition.

"I regard Raglan and Caer-philly as competition because people today will travel up to 25 miles to a garden centre, though around 60 per cent of business comes from within about five to ten miles."

This is one of the reasons why he has franchised out a large coffee shop and kiddies' play area on the site. He wants it to be a meeting-place, perhaps for mothers and their children, because there aren't that many places for them in the locality.

That he expects young mothers to be among his customers reflects how garden centres have changed with the growth of interest in gardening across the generations.

Although he will maintain a gift side to the business, he feels that garden centres are - and have to be - all-year-round enterprises.

He will make sure, as befits his background - he did a degree in horticulture at Bath University - that there will be a strong emphasis on plants.

"There are big margins on the gift side, but it also takes the seasonality out of the business," he said.

"Traditionally, the garden business was one where most of the plant sales were made in the autumn. Then garden centres came along and most plants were sold in the spring, which is probably not the best time for planting - autumn is better.

"But this meant that businesses had to keep going with large buildings and staffs at times when they weren't taking much money.

"In difficult times, garden centres are the last to go into recession and the first to come out, because people don't go on holidays, spending more time in their garden, they buy plants and want to spruce up their houses and plants are the cheapest way of doing it. You can make your garden look attractive without spending a lot of money."

Mr Boyle said he wanted to make sure the centre maintained a good core garden business. Some places had departed too much from this and looked more like department stores.

"We are not naive - we want to sell people everything," he said. "But the gifts will be an aside and we want to make the strongest gardening offer in the area.

"We will display a wide range of plants and if people come to us with requests we will do our best to get them through a plant-finding service."

At Bath, his degree course was closely allied to business and his department shared lecturers with the business faculty. Yet it is the connection between TV gardening programmes and renewed interest in subjects green-fingered that drives garden centre business.

"We see it in terms of the product. You listen to what people are saying and the names of Charlie Dimmock and Alan Titchmarsh will crop up. These are now synonymous with gardening.

"If a Friday evening gardening programme mentions a plant you can bet you are going to be asked for that plant on Saturday. Sometimes it's a purely subconscious thing: they can't remember where they've seen a plant featured but it was probably only the night before.

"Gardening programmes are a bit like DIY ones in making people believe that there is no mystery."

He said the majority of customers were retired but more and more younger people were becoming interested in gardening for a number of reasons.

"They see it as an extension of their house and adding value to it," he said. "Compared with decorating their front room, decorating their garden is still a lot cheaper." Mr Boyle's expertise extends to his staff, who also have horticultural knowledge wherever possible. Like many independents, he is sceptical of superstores with garden appendages and claims they do not offer cheaper plants or thorough advice.

"In terms of dry goods, they might be able to offer cheaper prices but they cannot do this with plants and I would defy people to show me that they can offer cheaper plants," he said.

"They have to be supplied by large companies who may have to service something like 300 sites and this, in terms of plants, adds 25 to 35 per cent to the cost - so they'll never be cheaper.

"Where we can, we will go for local companies and suppliers who have lower overheads and lower transport costs, so we should be able to offer cheaper prices. Local suppliers mean that it will be cheaper for us in the long run and they are supplying a product that is used to the local weather conditions and better able to survive."

Survival and longevity among people are also factors in the business. More of us are retiring earlier and living longer with lots more leisure time. James Boyle knows this.

"It is one of those things that, if you are 45, you become interested in gardening and if you have been successful and you retire you will want something to do," he said. "So it is wonderful to take up gardening and learn a lot about it."

Chepstow Garden Centre is at 01291 626035.