Mail Order Plants

If gardening is one of your favorite pastimes and if your lifestyle is crammed with a fulltime job, familial obligations to a spouse, a couple of children and a dog name Rex and his arch rival Spider the cat; aging parents and demanding siblings as well as aunts, uncles and cousins; friends, acquaintances and colleagues; when do you find the time to tend to your garden?  Believe me when I tell you that I know how you are feeling because I am in a similar situation.

It has been a long time since I have come to terms with the fact that gardening is one of those hobbies that claims the time and the attentiveness which are so scarce in my life.  I, therefore, had to decide whether to give it up completely or to find ways to cut corners and I opted for the latter.  For me, cutting corners in gardening meant that I had to find ways of saving time and the best way to do that is by shopping through online mail order plant catalogs.

Mail order plant catalogs afford me the convenience to shop for plants and all other gardening needs at anytime of the day or night.  It is quick, it is easy, it is handy and it provides me with then added bonus of saving money in the process.  Today’s World Wide Web and the Internet give shopper anytime-access to countless websites of mail order plant catalogs from which shopping can be accomplished directly or, alternately, printed catalogs can requested.  The mail order plant catalog websites I most often frequent are the following:

• Smith and Hawken have been in the gardening business since 1979 and have had ample time to work out all the kinks and to get it right and so they did.  Although Smith and Hawken offer a wide range of products that includes indoor and outdoor plants, tool and equipment, garden decorations and so on, I mostly order from their great selection of citric fruit trees such as lemon, lime, tangerine, orange, grapefruit and kumquat.
• Greer Gardens is located in the fertile valley of the Willamette River right outside of Eugene, Oregon and they specialize in rare and unusual plants.  Greer Gardens’ beautifully designed catalogs offer approximately 4,500 varieties of plants and this is where I order most of my perennials.
• Fantastic Plants is an online mail order plant catalog that specializes in Japanese maples and dwarf conifers but they also grow more than 1,000 varieties of trees, shrubs and perennials.  Fantastic Plants is the mail order pant catalog of my choice for container grown, non-bare root, vines and climbers.
• Streambank Gardens is where I order most of the plants and whatever else I need for my vegetable garden.

Dave’s Garden and the Mailorder Gardening Association are not mail order plant catalogs but they are rather wonderful resources for lovers of gardening as they provide the information that you would not normally find anywhere else.  I visit these websites periodically to find out what is new, what is exciting and what is anticipating in the international world of gardening.