Buying Garden Plants: Online versus Local Nursery
I’ve spent the better part of this past spring finishing up the design and upkeep of our home’s front gardens. I originally laid them out last summer, ordered my plants (almost all online at first), then planted in the fall when my shipment arrived. For now, I’ve dealt solely with perennials. In coming years, I’ll add annuals to the edges, where I’ve left space for them. But since our home had NO gardens to speak of when we bought it 3 1/2 years ago, priority #1 for me was HAVING SOME.
And so now that I have experience buying and planting plants from a variety of sources, I thought I’d share my findings.
COST
For local purchases, the absolutely least expensive place to buy plants is Walmart. Especially once they near the end of the selling season and put perfectly good plants on clearance. Home Depot and Lowe’s also have respectable pricing. All three tend to sell commonly-desired plants, so if you are looking for a very traditional garden, they will serve you well while saving you money and allowing you to bring home your plants at your convenience.
Local nurseries charge more (usually) but have a better selection and access to rarer plants. If you want to have complete control over WHEN you do your planting and you want gardens that stand out from those found in all your neighbors’ yards, or if you’re looking for larger bushes or trees, visit a few local nurseries. Haggle on the price; sometimes they are flexible (especially if you’re buying multiples of an item – their prices are set for selling them one at a time, usually). I found that while I had to pay more for our laurel bushes than I would have online, I was glad to be buying larger specimens, and I got the fourth bush nearly free once I negotiated. All four are still with us this year, which I can’t say for some of my purchased-online plants, so I’m glad I obtained them locally.
Regarding online purchases, always, ALWAYS look for coupons. Most online garden centers run specials (for Earth Day, near the end of their Spring or Fall shipping schedule, intermittently during the season…). If you pay full-price online, you will be miffed when you receive the tiny little plant specimens they usually send you. The pictures online look so great and then you get this tiny pot with an itty-bitty plant. You’ll want to have gotten a deal on price.
I’ve had good experiences with Spring Hill Nurseries, overall. I ended up cancelling an order with Breck’s Nursery (more on that later), and I also get catalogs from Michigan Bulb Company. So I can speak to those three nurseries, at least. But then, I can probably speak to several more, truth be told. You see, after some research, I found that all three are owned by the same parent company – Scarlet Tanager LLC. And they also own The Garden Store, Garden’s Alive, Guerney’s, Audubon, Flower of the Month Club and Henry Fields. So pretty much, whichever one of those you choose, you’re getting the same products. Some have a wider selection than others, and some carry products the others do not, but no doubt the suppliers are the same and the quality is the same, so by all means, HIT THE SALES!
And hold onto those plant guarantees, too. I received a set of 6 bulbs and a set of 6 roots from Spring Hill this spring (among a bunch of other plants), and when NONE of the bulbs and only 2 of the roots actually grew, I called them up and they mailed me replacements for all 12 within a week. While I was disappointed initially that the plants failed, the fact that they did honor their guarantee (and that the new sets are looking fine) will keep them on my list of resources.
PLANTING SCHEDULE
Most of the online sites have shipping schedules that do not include summertime shipments. And sometimes they run out of an item and so that item gets back-ordered till the next shipping cycle. I ran into this snag with Breck’s online this May. I ordered a bunch a of plants for our rental’s back yard from Breck’s, and when I had heard nothing from them by the last day of the spring shipping cycle, I gave them a call. Sure enough, without ever notifying me, they had simply bumped my items to the next cycle since they were out of stock. This meant those items would arrive in October, rather than June. And two of the items are “not recommended for Fall planting,” so they actually bumped those to next March!
Since we hope to re-rent the place way before October, let alone March, I cancelled my order. I was very disappointed to find that a) they don’t update their website to indicate which plants are out of stock (I should never have been able to order those plants in the first place!), b) they made no effort to let me know the status of my order when it was clear that it would not ship in the spring, and c) my cancellation seemed not to phase them one bit. I’m not very hopeful that they plan to make any changes anytime soon. So I do not plan to order from them again.
And I will go out and buy time-sensitive orders in the future. I lost three weeks waiting for Breck’s and never would have known what was going off if I hadn’t taken the initiative to call them!
So if it IS June, July or August, and you ARE willing to do the watering necessary to get your new plant off to the right start, you have no choice but to purchase it locally, either from a Big Box or from a local nursery.
If you’re good at planning ahead and then being patient for a shipment, the benefit to the online services is the one-stop-shop feature. You can SEE what the plants WILL look like once they reach maturity, and you can select shapes, sizes and color varieties all in one place and design your garden all on one website. And you have access to information regarding light requirements, deer deterrance, and spacing requirements as you make your selections.
PLANTING
My advice for making the best of a Gardening-Designated Saturday is to have done a garden layout during that week, know which plants you want to purchase (or which are on-order), then call around to see who has them. That way you can pick up everything in one great shopping trip in the morning and spend the rest of the day getting your plants into the ground.
Don’t over-buy, remember that you have to PLANT everything you bring home, and pace yourself. Better to have to designate an additional Saturday than to be planting in the dark of night and still have a few little guys still wilting in their pots in the days that follow.
A FEW FINAL TIPS
1. Regardless of the assertion that you can plant either in the Spring or in the Fall, the Spring is the best time to plant online purchases. A little under half of my Fall-plantings returned with the Spring, and this past winter was a relatively mild one. I re-ordered the missing plants this spring and have had nearly 100% success in growth.
2. For common garden staple plants (daffodils, hostas, pinks, phlox, tulips, etc) you will have better luck and just as impressive savings buying them from your local Walmart’s garden center versus buying online or at a nursery. There is no need to pay shipping and then to receive a much smaller plant when Walmart has them (as does Lowe’s or Home Depot – although the latter tends to specialize almost exclusively in annuals).
3. Buy annuals locally. Online garden suppliers do not necessarily ship immediately upon receipt of your order, so you may wait weeks or more to receive a plant that will bloom for one season and then not return next year.
4. Remember the green. No, not your money, this time. Every garden benefits from having somet hing leafy and green as a backdrop or center (depending on the location of the garden). So do invest in some shrubs or other “anchor” plants, and if you can afford it, buy them already matured from a local source, so you have something to see right away in your space as you wait for the other plants to fill out.
5. Dream big. Pay attention to spacing instructions for mature plants. Even though that tiny starter plant shipped to your house doesn’t need it, the full-grown one will, so don’t over-crowd and keep the long-term view. It’ll save you time in the end, since nothing will need to be moved later!
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5 Responses to Buying Garden Plants: Online versus Local Nursery
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July 7th, 2009 9:10 pm
Helpful article! I had bad luck with online plants, so after one try I was done. I’ve had better luck with plants from a local nursery, they always look much healthier than plants at the box stores as well. Check around, sometimes nurseries have great sales, for instance a nursery near me always has a spring sale with 3-4 cell pack perennials for $0.99. They’re tiny, but they catch up quick.
Another way to get a lot of plants for cheap is to try winter sowing. It can take a little patience, but after three years, the majority of plants in my garden were winter sown or bought for $0.33 each!
July 7th, 2009 11:25 pm
I LOVE money-saving tips – thanks!
July 14th, 2009 12:39 pm
What a thorough article! I wanted to add to your list of online nurseries. I too have gone through the trial and error stage and I think that for the money and the quality Garden Harvest Supply is the best online nursery to buy from. Their plants are grown in 3-4″ pots and arrive alive and ready-to-plant and ready-to-grow. Their quality is unsurpassed in my book. You might want to check them out! http://www.gardenharvestsupply.com/home/
July 17th, 2009 9:45 pm
Thanks, I’ll try them next!
July 19th, 2009 4:30 pm
What an interesting article. I’d never thought of ordering plants online. But that might be my best bet for bulbs. Irises are expensive at my favorite nursery and the ones at HD or Lowes are puny and uninspiring. Thanks.