Shop local and get more bang for your gardening buck

Apparently I’m a ginkgo collector now.

I didn’t see that coming, and I certainly didn’t set out to become one, but my recent online shopping history suggests otherwise.

In a single, unplanned visit to a specialty nursery website last week I bought three different ginkgo varieties, all tiny plants at prices more appropriate for a plant you’d need a shovel for, rather than a trowel.

I can’t explain how this happened. I just know that I was on the internet and a short time later I had a purchase confirmation in my email.

But I’m not alone. According to the New York Times, online plant shopping grew 7% between 2020 and 2024, with one grower reporting an astonishing 120% increase in online sales during that time.

Not too long ago, mail order plants were a last resort that mostly seemed to be a borderline scam set up to trap winter-weary gardeners beguiled by tissue-paper thin pages of the plant equivalent of glamour shots. If it weren’t for the fact that placing an order required filling out an order form and then either writing your credit card number down or including a check and mailing it off, a lot more plants probably would have been ordered.

It’s a good thing they weren’t. Plants often arrived as tiny, anemic, often unidentifiable greenish blobs that spent way too long in a shipping box and rarely survived.

The plants that you can buy online today are much better, but you’re going to pay handsomely for them. They are generally smaller and significantly more expensive than those sold at a local garden center or hardware store.

Most perennials that are sold online are in 4-inch or smaller pots, about half the size of what you’d buy in a store, and online shrubs are significantly smaller than what you’ll find locally.

And then there’s the shipping charge. While the free-shipping perks left over from the pandemic still apply for a lot of online purchases, that’s not the case for plants. In addition to being heavy and requiring speedy delivery, plants also need to be firmly secured in a box. Shippers have developed their own methods for strapping plants down, but few methods can survive the seemingly inevitable drop kicking that a box marked “Fragile, live plants, this way up,” elicits from a frustrated delivery person.

Those fancy (but tiny) ginkgos I accidentally ordered came with a flat shipping charge of 40% of the purchase price.

You can get a lot more bang for your buck by buying plants locally. You’ll know exactly what you’re getting and they’ll be bigger, probably less expensive and almost certainly healthier, and there’s almost no chance that they’ve been drop kicked.

In other words, if you can find it locally, you should buy it there. If you’re after an oddball plant that local garden stores don’t have, you’ll probably have to resort to online shopping.

But beware, you might just end up with a plant collection you weren’t planning on.