Those plants are massed produced to service HD's clientele,
and Hines have been going through some very disturbing financial difficulties for the past 2 years.
I won't shop at HD,and would recommend others to do the same......
Poor quality,and even poorer customer service.....

You're right, Hines Hort is dripping in Red ink.
In their last earnings report, on sales of $232.5M, they reported a loss of $46.5M.
Their stock, Ticker Symbol= HORT (OTC) has plummeted from a 52-week high of $1.05, to as low as 3¢ and last trade was 9¢ (6/9/08).
You wonder what is going on there?
When George returns the Fuchsia's, there's another loss to report. :Rb

Now I feel being CHEATED big time by someone who knows he could reap me and many others without consequences.

I believe they do accept the consequences. They guarantee the plants and will refund your money if they fail. If you think about the high prices you pay at nurseries who guarantee the plants for the five minutes it takes to load them in your car...HD is providing an excellent service.

If you buy a $40 hydrangea and don't water it, HD gives you back your money for neglecting the plant. That's more than fair. It allows us to take chances and WE have no consequences. I don't see downside.

In addition, I often hear people say "The clerks at HD don't know anything about plants". The school children working at my local nurseries (minimum wage, no benefits) don't know a garden plant from lawn grass.
Marnie

beancounter,

I was talking about misleading on Hines' part, though they stop short of telling straight lie. Not ethical at least, they lost even remnants of my respect to them.
I'm truly mad about outright cheating on HD's hort.buyers and management part who INTENTIONALY brought tender plants into colder zone and selling it as a perennial with very reasonable hope that people will buy plant based on what label said and then will be not able to locate either receipt or original pot.
BTW, HD here changed return policy from 1 year to 90 days, so they feel very comfortable in that respect as well.

I don't expect from individual HD floor-people to have a hort.knowledge, but division buyer-manager is the one who KNOW what he was ordering, for sure.
Shame, shame on them.

Gartenmeister Bonstede is a GREAT plant and a hummingbird attracter as well. Mine is now 5 years old and still going strong. It sits in a sunny window indoors all winter, blooming away and then goes out to my front steps in spring when the weather settles and it is flowering there now.
It's really a shrub, not a perennial as it forms a woody structure that lives on from year to year. I would have to say that it flowers 365 days in the year - how many plants can do that?

I can understand your feeling cheated, even though it sounds like you may have a nice plant there as long as you have a place to overwinter it. However ...

DH works at HD, and whenever I tell him someone has a problem, complaint, etc. he tells me: they can go right to the website (www.homedepot.com), scroll to the bottom of the home page, and click on 'Contact Us' to send an e-mail message directly to corporate headquarters. There is also a survey at www.homedepotopinion.com (it's printed right on every receipt); eventually it will ask for the store location, because the results, for better or worse, are sent to the store management and staff weekly.

Honestly, he gets just as annoyed about things like this because he busts his (ahem) every day to make sure his customers are satisfied, in the long run as well as short term, and this type of thing makes that more difficult (though he's not in the garden center).

We all need to vent sometimes, and the sharing sometimes helps others as well as ourselves.

I haven't taken a label at a big box place (HD, Lowe's, Wally World) at face value for years now. I've duly registered my complaints, only to have them ignored each and every time. Okay, so I have grown up with an understanding of hardiness, microclimates, environmental factors and all kinds of information about plants because I was born in Sacramento, CA, lived there until I was 7 years old, and then started traveling all over the world.

When my family first purchased a home in Sparks, Nevada in 1973, the first book I purchased from my allowance was the Sunset Garden Book. I was 14. The zone designations are very different from the USDA designations, but those Sunset zones also contain a lot of descriptive information about the climate in a given zone: humidity, high temperatures, low temperatures, rainfall, altitude, sun, cloud cover, winds--everything. Needless to say, I already knew what was likely to succeed in my climate before I purchased my first plants and seeds less than a year later.

Sure, it would be nice if big box stores carried information accurate for their locations. Sure, it would be nice if garden center staff had even half a clue. But you don't get information (accurate or otherwise) or helpful staff at big box prices. There's a reason the locally-owned nurseries often charge two to three times as much for the same plant.

And even if garden centers here in Reno-Sparks have information available and tolerably trained staff, it's still not adequate. My zip code (89431) spans climate zones ranging from 5a to 7a, and I'm not even considering microclimates. The zip code contains altitudes that differ by as much as 1000 feet (literally ear-popping on some streets), and that have varying degrees of exposure to prevailing wind and weather, at least three different soil types (former marsh clay soil, former river bed sandy soil, and rocky sandy volcanic mountain soil) and varying degrees of proximity to large and small bodies of water (a river, a man-made lake, agricultural ditches, seasonal streams, drainage ponds, high water tables, low water tables, rain shadows and arid desert). It's the same all over the greater Reno-Sparks area. Conditions in my garden are not the same as conditions in another friend's garden only two miles away. It's not realistic to expect any but the most experienced of nursery staff, gardeners themselves, to even come close to knowing what will grow or not grow in a given customer's garden.

Perhaps in areas where the climate is more consistent it would be reasonable to expect garden center staff and plant labels to reflect the prevailing conditions. Still, I think that principles of garden shopping and plant selection in Northern Nevada are useful anywhere. Know your own garden, know your own climate, know your own microclimates. Don't expect the vendors to know it for you.

I still don't get the OP's point. Did the label say cold hardy to zone 6? My HD sells cannas and mandevilla but I don't expect them to be cold hardy in zone 4/5.

In my personal experience over a long time span, you get better customer service at box stores than at nurseries. You don't necessarily find the unique stuff (if you are a collector) but you get a guarantee if it is mislabeled or it dies. I take personal responsibility for the plants I buy when it comes to hardiness, moisture requirements and sun/shade requirements. But that's just my own opinion.

A lot of plants in the big box stores don't show zone info on the labels. A lot of garden catalogs have incorrect or, (to be charitable) optimistic, zone info in the plant description.

But what's the point when 90% of the people shopping the the big box store and 95% of the clerks working there don't know what zone they're in or what it means? Is a cashier at the returns desk really going to whip out a tag from the drawer, saved from a plant they haven't stocked in five months, point to the zone info, and say to the customer "We TOLD you it wasn't hardy in z5!"

I've noticed plants stocked in the perennials section that say right on the tag "hardy to z8", but that's also misleading. HD and Lowe's both sell annuals, tropicals and hardy perennials. I would guess what happened here is that the guy who unloaded the plants off the truck put them in the wrong section because the tag said "perennial". Even had it said Z10 in big letters, that guy might well have made the same mistake, not realizing that z10 meant "tropical".

I'm siding a bit with bean counter here - and I have no stock or vested interest in any of the big boxes, although I do "invest" in some of their plant stock just about every year. My gardens aren't filled with exotica, just things that normally thrive either because of my own due diligence as to zone appropriateness, etc., or just dumb luck. And to be fair, some of the higher end nurseries and garden centers will be glad to sell you stuff that doesn't have a prayer in your climate.

Been gardening a long time and regardless of what a plant tag might say, sometimes I just know better.

My experience with box store plants is very limited, but I have noticed that during occasional trips to a local HD to purchase potting mix(they are cheaper than my wholesale supplier and the club stores!), there is no staff available to assist anyone. They have eliminated all personnel in that section, except at the check out lanes(usually, only one is open). Some of the HD's in this area have closed their garden centers and they recently closed all of their Landscape Centers, that offered larger sized plants and a better selection.
The sinking housing market has severely impacted their earnings also and this area has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the nation.
We are fortunate to have a large wholesale nursery in the area, with a tissue culture lab, a huge propagation & growing area and 2 outlets. They typically produce many unusual plants, not available from most local nurseries. However, due to market conditions and the severe drought conditions still prevalent here in the southeast, they have reduced their stock and selections dramatically.
As a result, some of us are forced to obtain plants from distant states. A shipment due from MA next week and one from OR, the following week. As long as my water supply holds out, I will be growing plants. The staff of life for all Fauna on the Planet!
Rb