Podcast Ep 329: While many businesses are still talking about sustainability, Arboretum co-owner Fergal Doyle explains how the business has quietly spent the past decade building one of the most commercially advanced sustainability programmes in Irish retail.
Most notably, Arboretum has done so without deploying a single euro of its own capital on energy infrastructure.
Since 2024 the garden centre business has generated 300MWh of clean solar energy and has eliminated 150 tonnes of CO2. This has generated more than €57,000 a year in energy services with zero capital invested.
“I think retail will continue to thrive as long as retailers develop the experience. People will buy from people”
Most recently Fergal Doyle, co-owner and chief commercial officer who will be representing Arboretum at Retail Excellence Ireland, was appointed president of the International Garden Centre Association, and completed the Chartered Director Programme with the Institute of Directors.
Arboretum is an award-winning garden centre and lifestyle retailer. The family business, founded in rural County Carlow in 1977 by horticulturist Rachel Doyle, is today a €14m turnover enterprise employing 200 people in three locations.
How the company has managed to grow its business and build a commercially viable “no capital” sustainability model is a master class for Irish SME owner managers to study.
Growing and thriving
“You have to be in a time of permanent crisis and just navigate that”
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Arboretum turns 50 next year. Doyle’s mother, Rachel, started the business, his father joined her shortly after, and what began as plants sold over an open garage door in Carlow eventually became a premium destination garden centre at Leighlinbridge, ten kilometres outside Carlow town. Locals thought the family was mad to move out to the country.
“People thought they were crazy to bring the garden centre out to the country,” Doyle recalls. “But they did, and that’s where we’ve grown and thrived.”
Food now accounts for roughly 30% of turnover. A second site in County Wicklow, redeveloped and opened in 2024, was built in partnership with Rob Steiner, a German construction company that specialises in garden centres across Europe. Arboretum found them through the International Garden Centre Association, of which Ireland is a member country. A third location, Arboretum Urban Green, opened above Chapters Bookstore in Dublin city centre, offering plants and food to urban customers who may have little more than a balcony to work with.
The Wicklow site achieved an A2 energy rating and incorporates heat pumps, air-to-water heating, underfloor heating and a rainwater harvesting tank beneath the retail floor that collects water from the roof to irrigate the plants. It is the kind of specification that many businesses talk about in planning documents and quietly abandon when the bills arrive.
Generating savings
The more commercially instructive story, though, concerns what Arboretum did not spend. The solar installations at both the Carlow and Wicklow sites were financed through a partnership with Vivid Edge, an Irish company that offers energy as a service. Under the arrangement, Vivid Edge funds, installs and maintains the solar infrastructure; Arboretum pays down the cost over time through the savings generated.
“It’s a commercially smart delivery model,” Doyle says. “The whole idea is that we could preserve capital for the core business. It removed barriers around upfront cost and complexity.”
The structure also addressed something that quietly defeats many small and medium-sized businesses: the sheer technical complexity of procuring and installing renewable energy systems. Vivid Edge handled the assessment of technologies and suppliers, and navigated grant applications with the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. “As an SME, you’re not resourced to tackle that,” Doyle says. “So that was brilliant.”
The Carlow retrofit and the new Wicklow build were done simultaneously, something that would have been impossible had Arboretum tried to fund both conventionally. “We wouldn’t have been able to fund both solar solutions at the same time,” he says. “It allowed us to move faster and invest in the future of the business.”
Arboretum: sustainability at a glance
- 300 MWh of clean solar energy generated since 2024
- 150 tonnes of CO2 eliminated
- 57,000+ euros in energy savings
- 0 euros of capital invested in energy systems
- A2 energy rating achieved at the new Wicklow site
Governance as growth strategy
Sustaining a family business across generations is, as many Irish founders have discovered, a different discipline from building one. Arboretum’s answer was to appoint two non-executive directors, a move that Doyle describes as one of the bravest decisions the company made.
“Having the two non-executive directors allowed us to scale, to have corporate governance, and to have a proper form of board structure,” he says. “It gave us the confidence to bring on new people and those new ideas.”
The family structure at the top of the business includes Doyle’s mother, still involved, and his brother Barry, who is his co-owner and business partner.
Doyle also points to Retail Excellence Ireland as a source of competitive intelligence that other garden centre operators internationally tend to envy. The network mixes pharmacies, electrical retailers, fashion businesses and garden centres in the same room. “It’s not just garden centre land,” he says. “And that’s what the other garden centres internationally would be envious of.”
A new role on the world stage
Last October, at a congress in Cape Town, Doyle was appointed president of the International Garden Centre Association, a 58-year-old nonprofit with members in 19 countries. His mother held the same role in 2012 and 2013, making them the first parent and child to have done so. He chairs the board for two years, with the next congress scheduled for Munich and the one after that for Japan.
“It’s an incredible honour,” he says. “It’s a platform for the exchange of ideas and resources. Being part of a network like that helps with challenges around the cost of doing business.”
Those challenges, he is clear, are not peculiar to Ireland. “It seems like since Covid there’s been a tsunami of costs hitting businesses. Wave after wave. And then the minute you get over one thing, there’s another crisis waiting.” His conclusion is pragmatic: “We are in a time of permanent crisis and we just need to navigate that.”
A garden centre in the age of AI
The conversation turns, as most business conversations do now, to artificial intelligence. Doyle’s frame is characteristically practical. He worries less about disruption to the retail floor than about whether Arboretum’s product data is in good enough shape to be found by AI agents buying on behalf of customers.
“I suppose in the next few years people will have an agent buying for them,” he says. “We need to work on whether we’re going to be seen by those agents. What does our data look like? Are we easily found? Is the data of what we supply, what we have in stock, and the service we provide easily found?”
The point is not fanciful. Customers already photograph their gardens and ask AI tools to redesign them, then look to source the materials the algorithm recommends. A garden centre that cannot surface cleanly in that pipeline risks being invisible to a growing slice of its potential market.
Doyle is, however, sanguine about the limits of technology in his sector. Garden centres have survived because they sell something a screen cannot replicate: the feel of a morning spent somewhere green, a good coffee, and advice from someone who actually knows what they are talking about.
“We’ve got over 300 years of horticultural expertise in this business. Gardening is still our primary business, but you’ve got different needs from consumers. You’ve got information being accessed in different ways. What people can look up on their phone before they even come into you or when they’re in with you. That being said, I think we have created an experience and a destination, and I think retail will continue to thrive as long retailers want to develop their experience so that it’s not just a product on the shelf. You’re delivering something that people want to come to and spend time.
“I think retail will continue to thrive as long as retailers develop the experience,” he says. “People will buy from people.”
He pauses. “Technology and AI are going to play a role and will change things. I think it will make mediocrity free. But we’ll still have to add the sass.”
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Listen to the ThinkBusiness Podcast for business insights and inspiration. All episodes are here. You can also listen to the Podcast on:
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