The WINNERS ARE CHRIS C AND LIL NED. Thanks for playing and for all the fabulous glove stories. Some of them were real sagas. Fascinating!
Other gardeners are far pickier about their gloves than I
am. Aside from having progressed beyond the cheap cloth gloves you can buy by
the dozen, I mainly require simply that I have gloves. I do not enjoy running
my hands through dirt and getting it under my nails, and I really hate drying
out my hands from too much washing. Recently, I have been rotating three pairs
of heavy white leather/suede elbow-length gloves. I have a lot of grabby shrubs
and perennials and narrow spaces to squeeze through, so I like the protection,
and I like having three of them, so I always have a dry pair.
I also occasionally wear the colorful Mudd gloves and the
stylish Ethel gloves we were all given in Chicago. I like the Mudd ones—easy to
slip on and off—but they get holes in the fingers pretty quickly. So far the
Ethels have been used for indoor gardening tasks only. They do have reinforced
fingers, so we’ll see how they do outside this spring.
Recently, I was contacted by Womanswork,
a company that’s been mentioned here a few times, though I can’t see that we did a
giveaway. But so what if we did have one—here’s another one! Womanswork makes
gloves, hats, and other gardening gear. Their gloves have three distinctive
features: reinforced fingers and palms, a mesh insert for ventilation, and a
little metal carabiner (new word to me) hook that keeps the gloves together for storage.
I have two pairs to give away—a medium and a small, both the
color that you see above. If you'd like a pair, leave comments and please tell us about any new glove
discoveries you’ve made over the past year. I’ll choose from comments tomorrow at 11 am EST.
Guest Rant by Susan Reimer, Baltimore Sun columnist and blogger
Every new year begins with resolutions, and every gardener makes
them.
No buying another plant unless I have a spot for it.
Stay on top of the weeds.
Plant for fall color, too.
Don’t water at night, even if it is easier.
But Burpee, the seed
company, has taken New Year’s resolutions to a pretty absurd point: seed
varieties for the resolutions on your list.
For just $10, you can buy seeds for The Resolution Garden, "one
that will inspire positive changes in nearly every area of one’s
life."
The resolutions and their corresponding seeds are:
Lose weight – Lettuce Heatwave
Exercise – Pole Bean Blue Lake
Save money – Tomato Supersteak
Reduce stress – Mixed cutting flowers
Steward of the environment – Mondarda Bergamo
Spend time with the family – Sun Forest Sunflowers
Better food choices – Carrot Burpee A#1
Ouch. Can you say marketing ploy?
I admit that plowing through all the seed catalogs that arrive
in January is a full-time job. And it might help to narrow the choices and focus
on what exactly you want to do in the garden this year, instead of just picking
seeds because the pictures are pretty.
But this marketing approach makes gardeners look simple and
dumb, and even beginning gardeners don’t want to feel that way about
themselves.
And, as far as New Year’s resolutions go, how about this one:
Simply garden for the sake of gardening and you will get a little closer to
being the better person you resolved to be in 2010.
As most of our readers are already aware, Plant Delights
Nursery is known for many things—its dizzying selection of perennials, its lush
Juniper Level Botanic Gardens,its
ability to find or breed the weirdest , most wonderful cultivars you’ve ever
seen, and —last, but hardly least—its charming and intrepid founder Tony Avent,
who, when he’s not off on exotic plant-hunting expeditions or speaking
engagements, is composing witty plant descriptions and opinionated essays for
the voluminous PDN catalog.
Now that the wonderful book-size catalogs that the old
Heronswood produced are long gone, PDN is one of the few that is more than just
plant porn—it’s entertaining to read. (Old House Gardens is another catalog
with personality.) But a recent exchange I had on Facebook reminded me that not
everyone thrills to the twisted cultural commentary of the typical PDN catalog
cover drawing.
Gardening can make strange bedfellows. While I can safely
say that the majority of my friends here in Buffalo are on similar political wavelengths—you know how that can happen—this is far from the case with
my fellow garden bloggers. Gardening and blogging about gardening is what we
have in common, but often we’re worlds apart on other matters. And it doesn’t matter
at all.
Likewise with the PDN catalog covers, which seem designed to
be both amusing and annoying. I may not agree with whatever they might be
trying to say, but I have 8 other garden catalogs with pictures of flowers on
them. There is only one PDN, and nobody else offers many of the plants they
do—even for a zone 5er like me.
BTW, you can read hate mail from people who hate the covers on the PDN website. Here’s a sample:
That
is really disgusting crap you send out as a catalog cover. Go watch your Fox
News and don't bother me anymore. No more catalogs, no more email updates.
There will be no more orders. I don't need any right-wing fruitcakes sending me
stuff.
That’s
fine for them. As for me, no silly drawing is going to stand between me and Syneilesis
palmate “Kikko.” The $65 pricetag might …
Last year I reported that White Flower Farms had published
its first catalog with vegetables on the cover. Select Seeds has not gone that
far, but I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was to see the last page of
the 2010 catalog devoted to heirloom tomato seedlings. For the last six years
or better I have been ordering seedlings of old-fashioned flowers such as white
heliotrope, climbing petunia, nicotiania mutabilis, and various unusual
rudbeckias, pelargoniums, salvias, and violas. I never get seeds (no luck with them), but they’re
the only place I can find most of this stuff in plant form. They also devote an
entire section of their catalog to fragrant flowers.
This old-fashioned heliotrope is more dependable than the darker nursery variety.
You can buy heirloom tomato seedlings everywhere these days.
In Buffalo, our co-op nursery Urban Roots has been offering at least a dozen
varieties for the last five years. If I bought any, that's where I would buy them. But it’s always difficult to find
interesting annuals, and I rarely can in our local nurseries. If I were a seed
whiz and had more sun, I would also be growing such cottage garden beauties as
black double poppies, pimpernels, cornflowers, and blue woodruff—all offered by
SS and by many of the great seed companies that we rave about here. But I’m
happy with the plants. On summer evenings, the climbing petunia scents the
entire garden.
There are countless wonderful seed companies who specialize in
edibles—Baker, Seed Savers’ Exchange, Thompson & Morgan, Jung’s, and many
more. I get most of them; they’re beautiful. But this is the only catalog I
have been able to find that has interesting annuals, and I depend on it for
foliage and fragrance every summer. If they’re in trouble and needing to add an
edible focus, then I’m in trouble too. Add edibles if you must, SS, but keep growing and adding to the flowers!
I do like the combination of "Blue Horizon" ageratum with the tomatoes.
Tiffany, a Logee's staffer. Behind her, you can see some of the original 1892 furnishings.
But I still exercised caution, buying only 5 plants at the venerable Connecticut tropical plant nursery during a long-awaited pilgrimage last Saturday. I have been receiving catalogs from Logee's for a few years, and knew it was located quite near where we regularly visit family.
This place does over 60% of their business via mail order; it is a nationally-known venue for tropical and exotic plants, regularly offering a dozen or more varieties of jasmine, gardenia, abutilon, passiflora, hoya, hibiscus, and epiphyllum, as well as oddities (to me) such as Strongylodon macrobotrys "Jade Vine,” Elaeocarpus grandiflorus “Lily of the Valley Tree,” and Aristolochia gigantea 'Brasiliensis.' There are also plenty of carnivorous plants and weird cacti.
The narrow aisles are totally crammed with plants (human shown for scale).
For the winter indoor gardener bored by the usual selection at local big boxes, Logee's is a godsend, but if you ever plan to actually visit in person, my advice is watch your step, both literally and financially. The facility is much older than I expected, and you can still see the original nineteenth-century furnishings in the little shop you enter before the retail greenhouses. After that, narrow walkways and unexpected stairways lead you through an indoor jungle.
Plants are small but vigorous, sold in 2 and 4" pots, with some larger.
The owners were not around on Boxing Day, but I talked to an experienced staffer, Tiffany, who showed me some of the older retail catalogs—which showcased the original specialties of pelargonium and begonias—and talked about how the business had evolved from its 1892 beginnings. Logee's is in the process of building new, more energy-efficient propagation greenhouses, and is also striving to go entirely organic in its treatment of the insects and diseases that can be common problems with these kind of plants, keeping in mind that their consumers expect clean specimens.
Full-grown examples are all over the place, twining around metal supports and seeming in some cases to grow out of the floor.
I wondered how a place like Logee's deals with what should be frequent instances of buyer's remorse, as customers must regularly experience failure with some of the more difficult cultivars, and Tiffany stated that their on-call horticulturalists deal with these issues. She said the three main problems are over and under watering (most plants should dry down, then be thoroughly watered), overpotting (too-large pots lead to root rot), and—mainly—too much worrying and fussing over the plants. (“People need to relax!”) She also mentioned that a overwatering in a chilly room is as bad a the hot dry air of the average centrally-heated home.
The main thing with Logee's is that their plants are small, and not cheap, averaging around $10 each for the 2” and $15-20 for the 4”. But I have high hopes for the jasmine 'Ann Clements', ponderosa lemon, osmanthus (sweet olive), and gardenia (a species type) I purchased, all of which came with detailed culture sheets. For a plant addict like me, the wide variety of such fragrant cultivars is what makes Logee's worthwhile. For the casual visitor, it's as good or better than a trip to a public glasshouse, and you'll likely see a more wide-ranging variety of plants.
Especially on such a winter's day—windchill minus 2—my afternoon at Logee's is a very pleasant memory.
Some of my best memories of Christmas past involve the cutting down of Christmas trees. My husband and I would go out to an incredibly beautiful Washington County Christmas tree farm with deep snow and long views. Jeff could never remember to bring his gloves, so there would always be lots of shouting along with the sawing. I'd always want the biggest possible tree, so we'd have the ritual argument about what exactly our ceiling height was. Our dog Lulu, now departed, who was half Husky and never happier than in winter, would tear delightedly through the snow. And the key tool for this lovely moment was a Swedish bow saw. They'd hand you one when you arrived.
We were first introduced to this tool soon after we bought our first house. The woods were pushing the house into the street and my husband wanted to push back. So our friend Gerald, wise in the ways of the garden, said, "Swedish bow saw."
I never engaged in the kind of property clearing my husband did, but I was soon doing other things that required a saw, including cutting down saplings for tee-pees for my pole beans. So I picked up the bow saw and loved it. It's light, flexible, easy to use. The blades are cheap and easy to replace. But the teeth on those blades are really sharp. They just seem to rip into living wood, giving a 117-pound person like me the pleasant illusion of being a lumber jack.
The bow saw will make a beautiful, clean cut for pruning, and it will make quick work of offending plants chosen by the previous owner of your house. It will allow you to saw at weird angles and in weird places.
I've only gotten in trouble with my bow saw when I've been too ambitious and decided to take down a tree that's too big for the tool--say, one with a six-inch diameter--and wound up with the blade wedged in the wood. And that may be a problem of technique as much as a problem with the saw.
We didn't cut down our Christmas tree ourselves this year. My husband was madly finishing a book against a deadline. But even a bought tree needs to have its bottom branches trimmed up.
"Do you know where the bow saw is?" my husband said in that way long-time spouses have of implying a million things at once, like I use his tools too often and often don't put them back where anybody can find them because I am a disorderly person and it is a serious character flaw.
"In the garage, on the shelves to your left when you first walk in," I said, letting him know with that bit of information that despite a general tendency towards disorder, I do take care of the really important tools and ought not to have my character impugned when I possess a towering sense of honor that would never allow me to misplace something as crucial to the running of the household as the Swedish bow saw.
Fortunately, the bow saw was found. The branches were cut, the lights and ornaments were hung, and the Christmas tree is beautiful.
Far be it from me to encourage anybody to spend more money
on bulbs, BUT. Brent and
Becky’s is still shipping a surprisingly good selection of indoor-forcing
bulbs. And they’re 50% off. Normally, by this time in December, you would not expect to
be able to get such exotic tazettas as Grand Soleil d’Or (above) and Golden Rain (the
double form, below) but they still have them and a lot of other varieties, including
some nice hippeastrum and freesia. Most bulb houses have shut down their fall sales by this time.
I have already ordered mine, so felt it only fair to post
this, in case any of you were interested. They really do make terrific gifts,
in a nice glass vase with river stones. I have been giving them for years, and
the recipients always report successful blooming.
So there you have it. I felt sharing
this information was the right thing to do.
It's just a round ball of clay. Why do we love them so?
I try, every year, to come up with the obligatory list of gift ideas for gardeners. The list ends up being some combination of marital advice and marching orders for non-gardeners who must shop for the gardener they love. I realized several years ago that nobody ever buys me garden-related gifts; they either assume that I already have it or that I don't want it or that I'm so highly selective that they would surely give me the wrong thing. This, of course, is ridiculous. I want all kinds of stuff, and preferably more than one of everything.
Thus the list.
This year, I issued the following set of instructions to the non-gardener who needs one sure-fire, completely perfect gift that will fit any gardener. All gardeners. To compile my instructions, I wandered around the garden center looking for such a thing, and there it was. The clay sphere. Cheap (but scalable--you can buy a dozen if you've got the money), elegant, and weirdly appropriate for any kind of garden. Who thought of the clay sphere and what, exactly, makes it so appealing?
I don't know. But here are my instructions, in case you need to print them out and leave them sitting around for a certain someone:
Here's how this will work. You'll walk into the garden center and walk around for a little while, lost and confused, until some helpful employee walks up and asked you what you're looking for. You won’t want to ask, because it sounds so weird, but eventually you'll have no choice but to say, "Uh—do you have—uh—any clay spheres?”
The employee will light up and say, "Of course. They're over here.” He or she will lead you to the section in the garden center where they keep flowerpots. There, among the pots, will be these things. Clay spheres. There's really no other way to describe them.
You'll pick one up, feeling like an idiot, wondering if I'm playing a practical joke on you by making you pay twenty-five dollars for a ball of clay. Then you'll have to figure out how to wrap it. Then you'll spend the next few weeks worrying that you've made the wrong decision, and you'll go out and buy a scarf or a picture frame as a backup, just in case you have to pretend that the sphere was only a joke and not actually the real gift.
But then the big day will arrive, and the gardener you love will open whatever oddly-shaped package you've managed to put together, and the sphere will sort of roll out into her hands, and then she will say, in a deep and sensual voice usually reserved for much nicer gifts than this one, “Ooooooh.”
She’ll roll it over a few times, and then she'll wander outside with it, and maybe move it around once or twice before finding the perfect spot for it. If it's on the north side of the house, it will eventually get covered with a lovely green moss. If you pour buttermilk over it (or maybe eggnog -- I'm pretty sure leftover eggnog would work), it will soon sport a patina of mottled white mold.
You may never understand why this is all so wonderful. That’s okay. The important thing is that you did good. Just bask in the glory.
Yes, I am. But wait! This is the fun part. The publishers have
agreed to send a copy of Anna Pavord’s gorgeous and rather pricey bulb guide to
a lucky Rant reader. Before we get to the giveaway, I’ve had some time to read
more of the book. Here are a few of my favorite quotes:
You have to get used to the pitying looks that will come
your way from true snowdrop fanatics. “But surely you grow rizehensis?” they
will say, and if you don’t, you get The Look.
Avoid daffodils with very beefy foliage. ‘Bravoure,’ for
instance, has leaves so massive they could easily fell a passing gnome.
Fritillaries are like that. They creep up on you quietly,
for noise is alien to them. … But some of us like khaki and welcome this restrained
palette of colors at a time when we are being assaulted by hyacinths that are
too pink, daffodils that are too yellow.
And here's the contest. After talking to Pavord, I immediately
ordered 10 ‘Katherine Hodgkin’ irises (above) and 20 ‘Prinses Irene’ tulips because her descriptions made me
want them. (That’s how bulbs work.) What are your current bulb obsessions? Answer
in comments and I’ll draw from them for the winner. You have until 9 p.m. EST Friday, and I'll announce then.
As promised, I was able to stop by part of the Ofa
Perennial Plant Conference, a get-together for plant growers and retailers,
held here in Buffalo Sunday through today.
For some reason, I find myself intensely curious about what
plant growers and sellers talk about when they get together at events like
this. My first question: why Buffalo? According to conference staffer Brian
McLaughlin, they originally wanted Connecticut, but Buffalo was also central
for a large number of companies that produce perennials—for example, the Sunday
tours included visits to Dickman Farms, who produce for Ball, the herbaceous
test plots at Cornell, and Baker’s acres, who grow 1000 varieties of perennials
and 125 herbs.
During the Unplugged freeform discussion, I found myself
deciphering phrases such as “TC plants have no juvenility,” and “vernalization
requires soil temperatures of 42-45°.” One thing I got out of it is that tissue
culture causes issues for growers that does not happen with traditional
propagated plants. Much of the discussion centered on how continuous light
cycles help plants bulk up. It was significant that the plants used as examples
were echinaceas; one imagines that growers are jumping through all these hoops
to make sure we get those fluffy pink and bright orange and yellow varieties that
are wowing everybody at nurseries these days.
A discussion of green roofs was both exciting and
frightening; one of the leaders was Kees Govers of LiveRoof Ontario. (They
donated some of the small panels we used for a Show House project here in
Buffalo.) As you may know, any construction in Toronto over 20k square feet
requires some green roofing. But despite the huge potential of this technology,
it pretty much takes a village to make a green roof successful. If any link in
the chain—architect, contractors, plant providers, installers—is weak and if
maintenance isn’t planned for, green roofs fail (usually, with litigation). On the other hand, if Walmart
is considering green roofs, there’s every chance that the 182,400 acres of
potential green roofs in North America could become reality.
Next post: perennials for landscaping (some surprising, most
not).
Just as I cut down the last of my 10-foot-high rudbeckia
hirta Herbstsonne, and survey with resignation the fairly ratty appearance of
the rest of my garden, perennial growers are arriving to decide my gardening
future. A major horticultural industry conference is happening right here in
Buffalo tomorrow through Tuesday. It’s the OFA
Perennial Production Conference, which is not open to the public, but isdesigned to educate those in the perennial production and retail industries
about what’s new and what’s what.
Having laboriously found the website for this and having finally
determined what OFA stood for (Ohio Florist Association, a group that clearly encompasses
more than its name), I took a look at the schedule. All I needed to see was
Hard-Core Production Sessions and Secrets Revealed! to be totally intrigued.
Here are some of the sessions: A View of Perennial Use Around the World: Ideas
& Innovations We Can All Use, Forcing Perennials Into Flower: Beyond the
Basics (ha--now I see why this is for professionals), Perennials for Containers, and —the one I really want to see—The
"Perfect Perennial" from a Landscape Contractor's Perspective &
20 Perennials That Almost Meet This Criteria. (I like the restraint of the title.) Fascinating! Hopefully, I can
check out some of this action and report back.
And sometimes it’s just not worth it. As the years go by,
I’m realizing that I am probably not the ideal recipient for most of the swag
that companies like to send to garden writers for their review. Which is fine, because I’ve been able to
find surrogate product-testers who are happy to try out the trimmers,
cultivators, and other pieces of equipment that are generally not needed on my
grassless, urban property with its relatively small beds.
This Alpenglow is the standard for macrophylla success in my garden.
But hydrangeas are another story. I love hydrangeas and they
love my conditions: partly shady, protected from the wind, dense soil, and
intimate enough for a small shrub to really shine. Finally, something I can
use, I thought, as I ripped open a handsome package from the Endless Summer
folks. Inside was one of their
newest offerings: the Twist n’ Shout, a pretty purple reblooming lacecap.
It was not to be. In the eighteen months I have had this
small plant, it has done nothing. It has not grown. It produced a similar bloom
to the one that adorned it in the box when it (sort of) came out of dormancy
this spring, but that bloom is now brown on a wilted plant, (as you see)
despite the abundant rains this summer and our own regular irrigation. Let’s be clear: I am not blaming the
plant or the company. For a cultivar to survive in the fiercely competitive,
crowded, root-laden, carelessly-weeded Licata property, it can’t be a small, tender cultivar like
most test plants. It needs to be a tough, savvy adult, with big shoulders and
strong roots. I think ideal conditions for testing plants would likely include
plenty of space that could be set aside for just that purpose. But in an
environment where everything needs to look good relatively quickly and there
are no out-of-the-way corners, a gardener can’t be as patient as we’re cracked
up to be.
So I’ll continue to buy my big shrubs and big plants, and
here is a partial list of the products I would be happy to test and critique in
print or online:
Felcos (any size) High quality teak and wrought iron furniture/décor (I can
use an almost limitless amount of sturdy trellises) A big shipment of top-size tulip and lily bulbs every fall … Yeah, right. But even though my career as a garden product
tester might be severely hampered, I’ve love to hear from other who have been
successful at it—and what their recent favorites have been.
It should not be surprising that we get pitches and press
releases all the time. The online gardening community understands that blogs
like this have an impact. As they should! But we only pay real attention to
companies whom we feel have real news to share or perhaps a cool giveaway that we
know you’ll love. Or … you gotta appreciate a press release that starts like
this:
I HATE Phlox paniculata, I LOVE Phlox paniculata, I HATE
Phlox paniculata, I LOVE Phlox paniculata, I HATE Phlox paniculata, I LOVE
Phlox paniculata, I HATE Phlox paniculata, I LOVE Phlox paniculata!
Ha. Don’t we all feel that way about every almost every
plant that we grow? This is about the Phlox paniculata “Jeana” and it comes
from Barry of Sunshine Farms. Supposedly this miracle phlox has 100 long
lasting, fragrant, lavender/pink flowers, and (of course) never gets mildew.
And all that may be true. But what I love about this pitch
is the acknowledgement of the vagaries and ambivalence of gardeners. Innocent healthy
plants that are doing just what they ought to be doing, no more and no less,
can evoke hatred and disgust, while sickly, faltering specimens call forth our
most loving attentions. How can we get them to thrive? And then there are
plants that run the gamut. I love, love , love my purple-flowering
hostas in July, but in mid-September I plot against them, hate their yellow,
prematurely-decaying leaves, and plan to pull them all out in the spring.
Right now I HATE phlox paniculata. Last year my three plants ("David's Lavender," top) from Select Seeds did fine; they bloomed about 3 feet high. Now there are about
7 plants, they’re all about 5 feet tall and none have bloomed. It’s been a wet,
chilly summer here; we’re just now getting some heat and sunshine, but still.
They don’t have mildew though, I’ll give them that.
None of this exactly makes me want to try“Jeana.” But I liked the pitch. Now
that almost all the plant vendors have initiated regular enewsletters and other
digital marketing efforts, I am automatically deleting more emails than ever
before. Recently, Brent and Becky’s indicated they may start a newsletter—we'll see what they decide. Hopefully, they'll follow the example of companies like Sunshine, Old House Gardens, and, of course, Plant
Delights for devising pitches that entertain, inform, and amuse.
Guest Rant by Maureen Decombe, a/k/a Plantanista, following Scotts' announcement that it's closing all 56 Smith & Hawken stores by the end of 2009.
A loving homage to the beauty of functional, well made
garden tools, the Smith & Hawken catalog came into my hands some time in
the mid 80s. Soon after that, the long-shanked English Garden Spade made its
way to my front porch. Unpacking the tool was a ritual during which I began to
feel like a real gardener, one who cared enough to invest in a great quality
tool that would last my lifetime. Over twenty years later, and I still use it
at least once a week.
Though I’ve not cared
for the extra-long wooden shaft as I should have, it feels as if a permanent
groove has formed between my fingers and the warm, solid D-handle. The
hand-forged blade has sliced soil from the east to the west coast, and in a
full-circle irony, eventually returned to Palo Alto, the town in which Smith
& Hawken grew from an order-fulfillment garage to become a garden lifestyle
empire.
Jackie wins! Thanks for playing, everybody, but most of all,
thanks for your often hilarious and provocative comments.
Just for fun, here are some of the strange or not-so-strange things
people mentioned having seen at garden centers and nurseries.
Air plants (tillandsias) glued (ouch) to plastic fairies. I
can’t even imagine what that looks like. Coincidentally, our randomly chosen
winner Jackie mentioned those.
Booze. A lot of places have little wine bars and cafés. I
can kind of get behind that. A glass of wine while shopping for plants? Sure.
Llama fibers (from Deborah). I still don’t understand that
one.
Reading Dirt mentioned
life-size elk and lion sculptures (made of iron!).
Common Weeder talks about miniature John Deere equipment for kids. That may not be
strange to many of you, but I’ve never heard of it.I looked for it on the web, though, and found a JOHN DEERE BARBIE. Check out her boots! I loved all the little mini-tractors and stuff, too.
Kat talks about perfume (they have that at my favorite
nursery actually, but it also has great plants), while LauraBee has seen 25k
oriental rugs. Marie found a rug made out of stones.
Many commenters mentioned horribly tacky holiday décor, from
fake trees with fake spiders hanging from them to Easter eggs the size of
bowling balls.
Katxena found textured wallpaper, Elizabeth could
do without the hand-painted silk scarves and PlantingOaks wonders why, why, why
the decorative table lamps.
I think the saddest things, even sadder than the dead plants
(which we’ve all seen) are the plastic ones.
Oh, and on moving merchandise. Yes, we understand seasonal
changes and moving stuff to pique the interest. What we don’t get is hiding or discontinuing basic garden
supplies—which is what started this whole rant.
Again, thanks, and may your next trip to the garden center
be enjoyable, whether you find what you are looking for or not.
Or I would visit a small, locally-owned toy boutique. Regardless, I can assure you, I would
not be looking for them at my local nursery.
Nonetheless, that’s what I found the other day, right where
they always used to have the bamboo stakes. Little furry birds that make
authentic noises. I asked a staffer where the stakes were and he looked at me
in puzzlement. I asked another, and she looked at me in puzzlement. Finally, we
unearthed an old-timer who knew where the bamboo and wire stakes were kept, way
back in the corner behind the cocoa matting, sort of near where the pond
supplies used to be.
It’s not just nurseries and garden centers. Stock is moved, sent back, and replaced on
a daily basis in almost every retail establishment I frequent. Entire departments
are torn apart and relocated regularly. They even do it at the liquor
store—what’s the point of that? The assumption is that all consumers have ADHD,
unable to bear seeing the same merchandise in the same place longer than 36
hours. I’m afraid to tell friends
about a great shopping find, because I’m almost positive it won’t be there a
day later.
So be it. But will there come a time when I have to mail
order such boring garden necessities as stakes, ties, and cheap terra cotta,
while resin fairies, wind chimes, and stones inscribed with profound messages
can still be had at my local garden center? Look, I know that stores need to
carry what sells. But when the basics are relegated to obscure corners, it’s
only a matter of time before they disappear altogether. People may need them,
but sometimes it takes good customer service to explain to customers exactly
what they need and why.Maybe a
new generation of gardeners will assume that oriental lilies were just destined
to lie on the ground.
What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen for sale in your
garden center? I will draw from
the responses and the winner will receive the eminently practical Eleanor
Perenyi’s Green Thoughts—a brand new edition from Modern Library. Contest ends tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern.
When I was in Minneapolis, I stopped in at Bachman's, a sort of destination garden center loved by the locals. But these Minnesota people are too modest. No one had really been able to convey to me the sheer scale of their Lyndale Avenue store. Really, I don't think there's anything like it anywhere in the country. 230,000 square feet of retail space? You tell me.
I know what you’re thinking: big, pretty garden center, maybe a little coffee shop, nice gift store—big deal. Seen it.
Oh, how wrong you would be. Bachman’s is like the Macy’s of garden centers. And not, like, the small-town Macy’s you sometimes visit when you go to see your mom. No, Bachman’s is truly the glittery, big city, luxurious and over-the-top fancy shopping extravaganza of the plant world. We’re talking the downtown Seattle Nordstrom’s. The Union Square Macy’s. The Saks that is actually on Fifth Avenue. Only they sell plants instead of shoes.
Some of you have already stopped reading and booked your tickets. I know. It’s too much to contemplate. You could actually shop all day long—all day!—and never see a single dazzling trinket that is not somehow related to gardening.
The gift department alone is worth a few hours. Jewelry. China. Fancy vases. Scarves. Fountains. Pots. I don’t even know how to convey the fabulousness of the gift department to you. Words fail me.
Then there’s a huge flower shop—Bachman’s is a full-service florist with locations all over town and cheery purple vans that deliver the flowers—and a full-sized card shop. I got to take a behind-the-scenes tour of their floral department, and seriously, it’s bigger than most wholesale markets I’ve seen. If you go, try to score a tour. It will blow your mind.
Oh, and the plants. One greenhouse after another full of cheerful blooming annuals, perennials, herbs and vegetables, houseplants, gift plants, trees, shrubs—really, every time I turned a corner, I’d see another sales floor larger than most ordinary garden centers, all devoted to yet another category of plant.
The hard goods department—that’s garden center speak for tools, seeds, fertilizers, and so forth—was as large as most grocery stores, with just as many cash registers open. They had everything. Every. Thing.
And then there’s the café. Bachman’s put in a fancy little bakery and a lovely deli that does high-end sandwiches and salads, and you take your food and sit in an extraordinarily elegant and oversized version of a greenhouse, with the glass roof high above you, and plants and deliciously tempting merchandise stretching on for acres around you, and some kind of elegant jazz floating through the air, or maybe that was just in my head. It was lovely in the spring, but can you imagine how rejuvenating it would be in the middle of a long, frozen winter? Bachman’s stays open until nine every night in summer, and until eight the rest of the year. I’d be there every night until close. If they would only put in a bar I bet they could keep the place hopping until midnight.
The only word of warning I have for you plant geeks who are planning on making the trip is that this is not the place to find obscure, hard-to-find, unusual plants. The plant selection is all cheerful and familiar and, for the most part, heavily branded--Monrovia, Endless Summer, and so on. I'm sure that if I lived in Minneapolis I'd go elsewhere for weird and surprising plants, but I'd hang out here for the sheer fun of it.
I had hoped that this little video would help convey the enormity of the place, but I really think you have to see it for yourself. Sorry I couldn't come up with anything better for you. Just know that every shot is taken from an entirely different part of their vast, sprawling, retail horticultural empire.
In response to a post asking how readers store their gloves, I got the smartest damn answer: put all the right gloves in one bin and the left in another, grab one from each bin and go!
But here's how glove-makers could do the right-left sorting for us. Why not make ALL the left gloves one color and ALL the right gloves a different color? So these Atlas gloves, for example, could all be stored in the same bin and we could simply grab a pink and a blue and no worries! Not the expensive gloves we use for dangerous jobs but the cheap, everyday gloves. I would totally buy them by the dozen.
It takes 600 exhibitors, including thirteen major outdoor show
gardens, twenty-nine smaller outdoor show gardens, and over a hundred floral
stands in the three acre Great Pavilion, to create the world famous Chelsea Flower
Show in London. As
much as £250,000/$390,000 has been spent on creating
a single show garden - for just a few days viewing before the site is restored
to the lawns of the Royal Hospital, the veterans’ hospital on the banks of the
River Thames. 157,000 people visit the show each year; it’s always a sell out.
But here’s the thing – you can’t buy plants. That’s right,
it’s a flower show but no plants are for sale. So what’s the point of all these
nurseries spending all this time and money creating such incomparable exhibits
if they can’t sell anything? Isn’t this a bit mad? Or just a bit too British?
Rob Hardy of Hardys Cottage Garden Plants says Chelsea is not about selling. “It’s about the
prestige of winning a Gold Medal,” he told me (as he admired his Gold Medal!). “A Gold Medal at the
Chelsea Flower Show is worth more than you could wish for, it’s known around
the world. It’s about credibility. Chelsea is the pinnacle, winning a Gold
Medal is far more important than sales.”
But not everyone agrees. Fifteen years ago John Metcalf of
Four Seasons Nursery, who staged some of the finest exhibits of perennial
plants seen in decades, took just eleven orders in four days and never came
back. More recently, others have said the same. So what’s the problem? I asked
Lynn Beddoe of the Royal Horticultural Society. Basically, it’s the site.
“With 600 exhibitors on an eleven-acre site there just
isn’t the space to stock plants,” Lyn told me. “And restocking every day is
impossible with the traffic issues here in central London.”
But she also puts a positive spin on it. “Don’t forget that
all the floral exhibitors take orders, more and more are selling seeds, plus
there’s a whole range of wonderful garden goodies on sale. And at the end of
the show, on Saturday, we have the sell-off when anything and everything from
the show gardens and floral exhibitors is sold off. Everything is recycled from
plants to planters.”
Three Counties Nurseries (they don’t have a website) have
created a great business selling seeds of American columbines at Chelsea after
giving up selling garden pinks because they no longer took enough orders to
make it worthwhile. But why not simply move the show to a bigger site? There’s
a huge park just across the river.
A simple answer, says Lynn: “It wouldn’t be Chelsea.
Firstly, there’s the historic link. The show has been held on the same site
since 1913 and it’s a privilege to be here. And the show has an atmosphere all
its own, it’s special. You can go to any garden centre to buy plants but only
at Chelsea can you see exhibits like this.”
And with more and more visitors from other countries,
including many from North America, perhaps it doesn’t matter if they can’t buy
plans – they can’t take plants home anyway.
Fortunately, there are other shows like the Hampton Court
Palace Flower Show, in
July, where the visitors can buy plants – and that’s where British gardeners go
if they want to take plants home. Chelsea remains the show people visit simply
to see the best of the best – without struggling around all day with bags full
of plants.
Photos: Top, the Gold Medal winning exhibit from Hardys Cottage Garden
Plants. Bottom, carrying home a bottle brush (Callistemon) from the Chelsea
Flower Show sell-off.
