Argh...so many threadlets to address. Kirimarie - I read your posts and obviously your opinions are valid based on your experiences. But, you never addressed what I specifically cited: walk around any average middle to upper income residential section of a randomly selected mid-to-large UK city. Walk around the same in the US. Anyone paying attention will spot huge differences in the amount of effort put into the personal landscapes, on average. It's not like I'm saying something crazy here that has never been said before. My parents aren't into gardens at all - I got the bug from my childhood neighbors who in a strange twist of fate were all avid gardeners. But every time they are in the British Isles they go on about how great the gardens are and my Mom will just take some pictures on a random street of people's gardens brimming with Fuchsia, Choisyas, Lilies, various vines, etc. A friend of mine who is also not at all into gardens went to Ireland with her erstwhile fiance and both said the gardens there were absolutely amazing. I'm sure they didn't visit botanical gardens, and by amazing they weren't talking about the fact there's a Phoenix canariensis in Cork. They were just talking about the gardens they saw in neighborhoods that were on their way to someplace. "I think the whole UK are "better" gardeners point of view is nonsense. " When you clearly spend more time at something, the world usually rewards you with the accolade of being "better" at it. The only scintilla of unfairness in what I say might be that, obviously, the climate makes it easier for the English to have the sort of gardens that they do than it is for most in the US. But that isn't to say it can't be done. I've visited private gardens in PA that are every bit as impressive as any I know of in England...(on a per unit land basis, of course...you can't really compete with Sissinghurst when your entire spread is the size of one walled garden there) but they might well be more work in PA. Doesn't have to be someplace moist: I once spent about an hour walking around the neighborhood near the Denver Botanic garden. I saw a couple very interesting private dry-climate gardens. Employees maybe? Probably just supporters who went to the plant sales. But most were just boring standard landscapes...blue spruce, some bland shrubs, whatever. This climate factor influences US regional differences, obviously, as gardengal noted. The whole west coast seemed a bit more gardenesque to me than the rest of the country, and I especially single out some parts of the Bay Area. Lawns... I agree in the west, the watering of ornamental lawns is absolutely a massive and foolish waste of water resources. (though I've gotten in huge arguments with some westerners about this...not online, in real life!) In the east, over maintained lawns are a different kind of environmental timebomb. Particular in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, where, years too late, the amt. of phosphorus in lawn fertilizer was finally restricted. But this doesn't mean lawns per se are the problem, it's just that people have a pig headed approach to them. I will never water my lawn. In the terrible summers of 2010, 2011, and 2012, it had periods of going brown. Big deal. I also don't fertilize it, because I don't need it to be a perfect shade of green, and fertilization would make it grow even faster than our often abundant rains do. Because I did some judicious broadcast spraying with trimec years ago, and - DUH - cut at the highest depth permitted by my Kubota MMM which is 4" on the scale but probably a little higher in practice - broadleaved weeds are so rare I can just spot treat them as needed. So, I am ecologically caring for my lawn. Many people are not, and too many people want theirs to look like a putting green. The house I posted, no, is not nearly the worst example of McMansion landscaping. Definitely not "horrible", in fact I would just call it average to mediocre. But the reason it's partcularly egregious is, sorry, someone who collects plants on such a massive scale, should by my estimation have known better. The formally trained person they hired (this I know from the real estate site where I snagged it) still got it wrong, which is actually more comical than some random local landscaping dude not knowing what he was doing. In fact, the university trained landscape architect producing something that pretty much says "local landscaping dude cramming plants in front so he can get the bill up to 25K". (thus feeding the wholesale industry beast which - to loop back - is the whole reason I branched out into this) It reminds me of the hilarious story of a mature Araucaria araucana - one of the only on the east coast - being cut down at a historic estate near Wilmington, DE, by a professional landscaper for "not looking English enough"(!). Seriously, you could not make up a funnier and truer anecdote about the ignorance of some in the US landscaping profession. It's priceless.

I've mailed cuttings, not plants with native soil on their roots, but cuttings to many states in the Continental US for over two and a half decades. I've received cuttings from many states in that time, too. I have mailed cuttings to several areas of Canada; seeds to Canada and Australia; budwood to Belgium and The Netherlands, and I've never had to have anything other than a Customs Form from the Post Office for shipments out of the country. I've never had any issues sending or receiving cuttings from any of the 48 continuous United States. If you send cuttings to Canada, you send them as "wood samples", no value. The same for bud wood overseas. For seeds to Australia, I simply listed them as "Rosa hybrida seeds (cross or variety name). I simply use Priority Mail, usually Flat Rate, and no one has ever interfered. Kim

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

Bought 16 trees six years ago; bareroot apples mostly but also pears peaches plum and peaches and received bareroot starters about the size of a number two pencil. I have nurtured them into beautiful trees and they started fruiting last year and two the year before. All crabapples and ornamental pears; I was heartbroken for all the work. I think that some sold as apples are an ornamental cherry. I went on line to complain and read your posting. Thanks for doing this great service. My plan is to graft this spring and I have been studying how on the net.