The most prominent recent trend in the global garden management sector is the strengthening of climate-adaptive maintenance in public gardens and botanical gardens. As heatwaves, droughts, and sudden torrential rains become recurring, garden operators in various regions, including Europe, North America, and Oceania, are focusing on redesigning their existing management systems—which were centered on irrigation, drainage, mulching, and soil improvement—into more sophisticated terms.
This change is significant in that it requires considering plant survival rates, operating cost reduction, visitor safety, and ecological resilience, going beyond mere facility maintenance. In particular, as public gardens serve as representative green infrastructure within cities, management capabilities that enhance water usage efficiency while maintaining plant health and landscape quality are considered a core competitive advantage.
In the field, there is a growing trend of shifting away from lawn-centered management towards expanding planting combinations resistant to drought stress, while simultaneously implementing organic-based soil improvement, rainwater utilization, zone-specific irrigation optimization, and early pest and disease monitoring. This approach helps reduce management uncertainty caused by climate change and, in the long term, stabilizes maintenance costs and resource input.
Urban green space policies are also influencing the operation of public gardens. Many cities are re-evaluating management standards for public green spaces with the goals of mitigating the urban heat island, addressing water scarcity, and promoting biodiversity, while botanical gardens and municipal gardens are serving as testing grounds for demonstrating practical management models. Consequently, management performance is increasingly being evaluated based on indicators such as resilience, moisture conservation, soil health, and ecological connectivity, rather than just aesthetics.
The industry believes that these international trends have direct implications for the Korean market as well. As summer heatwaves, localized heavy rainfall, and seasonal droughts recur domestically as well, there is a growing need to comprehensively design water-efficiency-focused maintenance, soil health management, and climate-adaptive planting strategies for public gardens, corporate landscaping, and green spaces in large-scale mixed-use developments. The view that the competitiveness of future garden management depends more on how stably it can be maintained with minimal resources than on how beautiful it looks is gaining traction.
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