Why doesn't every nursery in the country sell.....
laceyvail 6A, WV
9 years ago
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rouge21_gw (CDN Z5b/6a)
7 years agoUser
7 years agolast modified: 7 years agoRelated Discussions
Why doesn't my viburnum flower?
Comments (8)It is possible that some pesky creature - squirrel, bird, etc. - is eating the buds just before they open. Your statement that the buds seem to disappear just before opening leads me to think this. I was walking through a local woods yesterday, and found many small, barely opened buds, both flower and leaf, under a tulip poplar tree. I assume a squirrel cut and dropped them - some of the flower buds were partly eaten. I know that some birds, especially sparrows, can eat flower buds from some trees/shrubs, so it may be that your viburnumm is especially tasty just at opening time. If a flock of whatever found your viburnum, they could clean it off in short order. And that doesn't help you get flowers, I know. Sorry not to be able to help more....See MoreWhy doesn't mail order offer a warranty?
Comments (11)What are some items you'd consider a nursery's fault? The one I struggle the most with are pot bound plants. If I tease the roots and it dies that season whose fault is it? If I bareroot it and it dies that season whose fault is it? Countless times I've brought up how pot bound a plant is and they (some nurseries) say just plant it. For now on I might just say I'll plant it but cover me for the growing season. I don't even want a 1 year warranty, I just want the thing to survive from May until fall. But then I have crap like this to deal with. I go one right nwo with a Pine that was sent with burnt needles and it was already breaking bud in early March (from the east coast mind you). They told me to take extra care to protect from frost...ok. Well July closes out and the thing never fully candled and its now dead. No response after a couple emails and a couple weeks. I'm super busy during the week at work so I don't have time to be calling these businesses that are open from 9am until 4pm. My true problem is that I'm a collector stuck in a horrible market for local offerings so I'm relegated to either going mail order or not collecting. Its a love hate relationship with mail order no doubt. Yes that is snow in the background, place it came from had snow on the ground too....See MoreWhy wont a wholesale nursery sell a single specimen to me?
Comments (23)I still don't think the tax is the real, core issue here. Big but horticulturally significant (more on that in a moment, though) wholesalers like Foxborough Nursery or Marshy Point are perfectly able to sell plants at the Ladew Garden Festival event. Almost any modern POS system they are using to sell to their wholesale customers can flip a switch and start charging state sales tax. Heck, I seem to recall the cheesy "CLIPS" program a landscaper I briefly worked for in the late 1990s used could easily charge or not charge taxes on invoices. It's an entrenched mentality. Given the massive failures of wholesale nurseries since the housing recession started, not one that seems to be guaranteeing success and financial stability. Again, we don't really know what tlbean was looking for so I'm kinda shooting in the dark here. I don't mind if someone producing truly mass-marketed garbage wants to be a wholesaler since that isn't what I want anyhow. I used to be annoyed by wholesalers locking up difficult to obtain plants until I realized it's part of a bigger picture, that of a kind of blundering industrial obliviousness of the American landscape/garden industry. Yes, your local nursery would rather you buy something "on the lot" because that's the only thing that helps their bottom line. They don't care about the preciousness of your horticultural being. (haha) It's a subtle difference but clearly more people go into horticulture in Europe out of a genuine passion and hence can understand yours than do so in the US. Not that some in the US don't, but there's definitely a different mentality overall. Eisenhut doesn't have to offer every known magnolia cultivar. It would be cheaper and more profitable just to mass produce 15. Now, we are lucky to have a few nurseries that are exceptions and/or strike a balance like Rarefind or Forestfarm. But late 1980s Foxborough's catalog - that of the original founder who has long since died - had tons of ridiculously obscure cultivars. I sadly lost it but I do recall cross referencing the beeches with those in Wyman's Encyclopedia and they had almost every one listed, and a few others. Well, the progeny come along and decide it's not worth selling retail anymore, and it's not worth having so many cultivars. The bottom line becomes more important than the founder's legacy. And, that's fine...that's their choice. Now their online feature pages highlighting what's available are comparatively dull. Americans wholesalers see that, when the going is good (real estate bubbles rising) they can pump the market full of mid-prestige trifles that aren't very costly to produce but easy to mark-up, and make a killing. Cheesy upscale "landscape architects" are complicit in this nonsense by promulgating a ridiculous, over-planted style. I know of a McMansion in the Philly Mainline where the new owners just tore out absolutely everything that was crammed in front of it 10 years ago and had overgrown; my friends said it looks 10X better. Then they get bitten when the gravy train comes to a screeching halt. Sorry, fact is, this is clearly the way many of them prefer to operate, rather than cater their operations to fulfilling the horticultural dreams of the 1% of people who actually know plants. It's the same problem as with American car companies. Save 25 cents on a part now even though in might cost lives later and millions in lawsuits. (and, again, this is all overall patterns. Unless he was independently wealthy, Martin Gibbons seems to have been doing very well for himself selling palms to Londoners. It's not like all nurseries owners in Europe are living in abject poverty because they carry 2-3X as many cultivars as equivalent North American nurseries.) This post was edited by davidrt28 on Wed, Sep 24, 14 at 18:04...See MoreIf a nursery doesn't know their rootstock
Comments (4)Piper: I too tried buying from Stark Nursery (retail). When I inquired, I was told the variety I wanted was grown on M7 and Bud-118. I would have no choice on what I got. Glad to know the info but I took my business elsewhere. Yes I do feel rootstock is important to know so I know if I should stake or not, how big tree will get, how far to space out the tree and if it will do well in my soil. Once I bought a Ginger Gold without asking rootstock (was listed semi-dwarf). Tree arrived and was very nice but tag on it said "MM106". My heart sank as I have heavy clay soil. I lost the tree a few years later to collar rot. I will never buy apple trees again unless I know what the rootstock is. I do buy from Schabach's and they do not list the rootstock. When I call David and ask, he lets me know what the choices are and I mark that info on my order. He will honor a request and usually has apple varieties available on many rootstocks. Works great for me! Others like Raintree list the rootstock choices on each variety up front. I would suggest you buy your apple trees from a source that lets you know the rootstock. Listing as "semi-dwarf" or 'Dwarf" does nothing for me....See Morerouge21_gw (CDN Z5b/6a)
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rouge21_gw (CDN Z5b/6a)