Ordering Fall Plants Online

I’ve just had an interesting experience ordering plants online that I thought I’d share. The first nursery – Botanus – sent me a catalogue earlier in the summer and I just got around to ordering a few new bulbs to grace the garden. I didn’t order anything out of the ordinary but basic staple bulbs including the fragrant tulip ‘Angelique’, two short daffodils ‘Quail’ and N poeticus recurvus (both fragrant) and an Iris ‘Speeding Again’ a rebloomer. This is my first shot across the bows of starting to lay in new plants for this rather largish garden I have in my mind. It’s a tiny shot given the size of the garden but you gotta start somewhere. Ordering from Botanus was fast, easy and quick.

Ordering a few plants was a statement of faith that I’ll have the new tractor, garden soil, and some beds built by this fall rather than a need for new plants. It was a signal to myself that I had better keep my butt moving if I wanted to really get this garden underway.

I then turned to a competitor called Garden Import. This is another rather good mail order company and I hadn’t ordered from them before either. I’ve received their catalogues on and off over the years so this year I decided to correct that and make a small order to test them out. Three plants (about $50 bucks) produced three different shipping dates and three shipping charges. Neither the website nor the catalog that I could find told me which shipping system the plants were on. So I wandered around the site for 3/4 hour trying to find matches for the plants (fall blooming crocus) I really wanted that I could plant in the garden as it currently sits. Now I know there’s probably a very good reason for the different shipping dates and I know that companies need to recover their costs but adding an 8 dollar shipping charge to each of three plants pretty much added a third to a half to the bill. I backed out of the shopping cart and cleared the data – unpurchased. I’m going to source the crocus at another nursery (probably Botanus and simply have them add it to the order).

Have any of you guys ever done that? Gone through the online ordering process and then found the shipping charges made it difficult to justify only buying a few plants? Or had three different shipping charges added to your order?