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What You Need to Know When it Comes to Buying Plants for Your Garden

By Ivy Pressman, VisionScape

“When it comes to your garden, quality isn’t an expensive extra, it’s a must-have guaranteed by Mother Nature and her gardeners to save you money in the long run.”

Many great thinkers, from ancient philosophers to founding fathers, have noted that the garden is a place where we can bury our troubles and reap the benefits of a joyful spirit. And indeed we find many reasons for gardening, most of which involve the simple fact that it makes us feel fantastic.

Gardening is a deeply rewarding personal expression of who we are. But what if someone tried to take that away? What if someone told you that your garden had to be the same as everybody else’s, and that it was completely disposable, like Styrofoam packaging – you just use it, and then you throw it away.

But that’s ridiculous. No one would ever try to turn plants and flowers into low-quality, disposable commodities, would they?

The unfortunate truth is that they would, and they have. As big box stores have gradually taken the place of the independent business in our society, they have also taken over our gardens, and not for the better.

Growing Greedy

The goal of any box store chain is to dominate the marketplace, and this can be done very effectively by offering consumers a standardized, cheaply made product that appeals due to its low retail cost. Of course, we know where this has lead us: to appliances that break in a few years, linen and clothing that falls apart at the seams, and perhaps worst of all, to fake wood paneling.

It was with the birth of the box store garden center that this insidious trend finally sunk its claws into the loamy soil and tender roots of our plants. Essentially, box stores had to find a way to mass-produce the miracles of nature.

This was difficult. Big Box demanded huge volumes, and didn’t care if quality had to be sacrificed in order to get the numbers. But growers cared, and as such, many of the most well-established nurseries in the U.S. refused to work with the box stores.

Because of this, box stores found themselves working with start-up contract growers that came into existence specifically to meet the enormous demands of the bloated commercial chains. Often with no previous experience or tradition of skill, these wholesale suppliers agreed to meet the needs of box stores, whatever the cost to plant quality.

We all understand that cost because we have paid it again and again. We receive a flier in the mail that boasts “Fruit Trees for Five Bucks,” “Perennials for Pennies!” Blinded by sale-day enthusiasm, we run down to the box store and load up on plants that look great on the shelf.

But when we get home, something goes wrong. Was it us? Was it something we did? Grandpa had such a green thumb, why does everything we touch die? The answer is not in the thumb, but in the practices employed by big box stores that are supposedly saving us so much money.

It Begins with the Nurseries

The best nurseries in the industry have long since established a standard by which they grow plants for as many as eight years before releasing the healthiest to trusted garden center partners. These plants live longer, bloom bigger, and fight pests better than their Big Box counterparts.

Independent nurseries often minimize the use of strong chemicals and employ natural pesticides not only to ensure the health of plants but the sustainability of our planet. After all, what’s the point of growing a beautiful plant if you’re not protecting its environment? Buying from eco-friendly independent nurseries is one way that gardeners can ensure plant quality and make a powerful statement in favor of positive change.

With an eye to profiting rather than preserving, nurseries catering exclusively to box stores pump their plants full of chemicals to have them out on the shelves in two years or even less. These chemically poisoned “plants from the black lagoon” look good at first, but they almost inevitably whither outside of the carefully controlled environment in which they were grown. This is because when you take away their plant-steroids, you’ve got nothing left but a weak, stressed-out plant.

It Affects Your Entire Garden

Weak plants are highly susceptible to trouble like root-rot and insect infestation, both problems that can spread and negatively impact the other plants in your garden. It’s bad enough to get home and find out that a plant you just bought is crawling with spider mites; it’s worse when you don’t discover the problem until all your other plants are crawling!

Conversely, choosing to invest in plants grown by independent nurseries can benefit your garden as a whole. The most respected growers in the industry often infuse plant soil with beneficial mycorrhizae that help nourish root systems and ensure plant health. Once introduced, mycorrhizae will spread to benefit all the plants in your garden.

When it comes down to risking the contamination of your garden, or taking steps to ensure its continued health, the Big Box bargain stops looking like such a bargain. And in fact, this is only one of the ways in which we lose out as box stores struggle to keep their costs low on a naturally high-quality product.

Other major drawbacks of box store plants include:

• Stress and damage caused in transport by low-paid laborers.
• Stress and damage caused in-store by low-paid clerks who know very little about their “products.”
• Limited growing information that contains blanket statements which ineffectively standardize care for a wide variety of plants.
• Misleading displays and information that imply a plant can be grown in our area when it cannot.
• Limited selection that forces us to “choose” between impatiens or petunias as the be-all and end-all of gardening options.

It Makes All the Difference

In the end, we spend more money replacing dead plants and compensating for the failings of mass-production then we would have spent investing in plants grown by high-quality nurseries to begin with.

Meanwhile, garden centers supplied by independent nurseries sell an enormous variety of hardy, unique plants that you would never find in a Big Box, and that will last a lifetime if properly cared for.

The Difference?

The plants are grown by people who love plants, and sold by people who love plants.

That’s the secret to Grandpa’s green thumb. He didn’t get plants from people that sold toilets or curtains or fake wood shelving. He got plants from people like him that loved to garden. And as much as things have changed in our lifetime, the garden remains the same. It loves sun, water, and rich soil, and can only really thrive made up of plants that aren’t disposable.

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