Online Nurseries - Part 1

Featured This Week:  Collector's Nursery and Heronswood

It's nursery catalog time once again. They're flooding our mailboxes and providing hours of pleasure and pain for the plantaholics among us. Pleasure in seeing old friends listed and finding plants we've wanted or ones we've never heard of that intrigue us; pain in realizing we would have to rob Fort Knox in order to actually purchase even a small percentage of the hundreds we've marked as "must have".

If you are new to mailorder, read the Plants By Mail FAQ and see if the nursery you're interested in has received any comments from others who've ordered from them. For the ultimate in lists of mailorder nurseries, as well as sources for other gardening needs, see Barbara Barton's Gardening By Mail which is finally online. This mammoth compilation has been in print for years, with periodic new editions to update the information. I've got at least three of them in my library.

   More and more mailorder nurseries are coming online. This is great for us because we can at least see what they have to offer, even if we can't buy it online -- and we can on several of them.

 Just who is out there on the wild world web? It's hard to find out because most of the nursery sites are not well indexed by the major search engines. As I noted last week, I have more luck going to my own bookmarks and lists like Carol Wallace's.

   But, most lists and even my own bookmarks don't always tell you all you'd like to know about a particular nursery. So, after spending an immense amount of time searching for one plant for my article Finding That Plant Online, I decided that online nurseries deserved some more in-depth coverage. I've surfed a lot of them; some with an excellent web presence, some mediocre and some that shouldn't be taking up the band width.

   I went back through my bookmarks and ticked off the ones I wanted to tell you about. When I totted it up, I had over fifty! Featuring that many in depth is a good sized project. I only have space for a couple this time, but I'll do at least one more article along these lines.

Go To Page: 1 2 3 4 5

Articles in this Topic    Discussions in this Topic