plant finder

Hi,
I've been looking at stocking my garden with plants that suit the sites I have.
I've looked on here and in books (mainly bedding plant, shrub expert series).
I wandered down to my local garden centre but they didn't have some of the specific species I was after.
So is it a question of wandering round lots of garden centres or should I look at mail order for shrubs.
If going mail order, any recommendations?

Always bought on a "oh that looks nice" basis before sometimes works ou, sometimes not.

Haven't got my list to hand as am at work but included ground based honeysuckle and dwarf lilac.

Cheers
D

 

If I ran a garden centre I'd stock the most common plants that most people would want to buy. So I guess you'd find it a bit tricky getting anything 'specialist' from a mainstream supplier. Trudging round lots of garden centres may help, but the cost of petrol will probably even out delivery costs of going mail order.

I can't suggest anywhere though, as I only use the usual Thompson & Morgan, Suttons, Dobies, Fothergills etc... for seeds. Sorry, but goold luck.

 

Exlabman - I think the first thing to do is look round all the local garden centres and nurserys. Round me there are a lot. If you look in the Yellow Pages (online) you may find all sorts of local nurseries and other places that are not the common well known garden centres.

Its also fun to go to these places, and a good way of learning more about plants. But you will soon find that some are very good and others are not, and that some are very cheap and others are not. And some concentrate on plants and others mainly sell knick knacks. The chance is that somewhere not too far from you is an excellent site.

If that fails then I would use the RHS plant finder http://apps.rhs.org.uk/rhsplantfinder/ You can type in the name of a specific unusual plant and it will tell you all the nurseries in the UK that sell it. If you see a local one come up time and again, it may be the good site that you are looking for and worth a visit.

I would buy via mail as a last resort, simply because I would rather visit a good nursery and chat to the people there - and see the plant. If you take trips down the motorway, I sometimes stop off at a good nursery that might be many miles from my house. Cotswald Garden Flowers is one that I have visited a couple of times as it is no too far off the M5, albeit its a long way from my home. http://www.cgf.net/

 

I was the plant area manager for a very popular independent garden centre here in South Wales for 7 years. The person before me ONLY stocked what was popular, when I took over I " inherited " over 500 Choisya ternate " Sundance ". I soon dumped them. I decided to follow the principle, Quality, not Quantity. So I brought in the likes of Punica, Dicksonia and Trachycarpus.

 

is it one of the big names? Wyevale or the like?

Our local one has a huge influx of plants in the Spring, but I wonder round and think that they are expensive, and uninspiring varieties (but no doubt suited to their target audience).

They also sell plug plants of Spring vegetables well into the late Autumn (far too late to plant to get a crop), and they had Tomato plants a month ago which I don't suppose anyone who bought them could keep alive (anyone who could, at that time of year, would be competent and equipt to plant seeds surely?)

By mid Summer the gloss has gone off their shrubs and that makes me wonder if they were grown specifically for the Spring market time, or if they are good quality plants. Asking their staff a horticultural question often gets intriguing answers!

OK, you've got my drift I'm sure!

We have another nursery a bit of a flog away. Their plants are superb quality, and lots of more choice varieties. The owner is one of the judges at the Chelsea Flower Show and the like. There is a huge garden attached to the site which is open to the public (i.e. good enough that you have to pay to see it!)

If you want to ask a question you'd better have done your homework before hand because the answer is likely to be "Do you want it to be like A or B"

When I was a lad the plants from our garden came from a similar establishment, but they were all bare root - they were superb quality plants and established very quickly. Don't think there is much in the way of bare root shrubs now, just hedging and trees.

So my advice would be to try to find such a nursery near you if you can