LOL, it's a miserable cold snowy day here and I got such a chuckle out of your video, all those vile nasty little words! I think you need put something stiff in that drinking bottle and treat yourself to a relaxing deep shampooing! I'd also have been very peeved with those itty bitty expensive wisteria plants from Burpee, that's a rip off! I got a 4 or 5 year old honkin big 'Blue Moon' at Canadian Tire for about 60 bucks, so large it is difficult to get the thing inside my suv.

I'm not by any means an expert, but I believe mail order plants are often very small. Now, as to price, that's a frustrating thing. I have only done mail order from Select Seeds and GH Wild.

For Select Seeds, I knew the perennials would be very small, but they were extremely healthy and well-packaged. And when I say small, I mean really really small. But, the price was not high, average $6. Perennials around here at a nursery are generally $10-20. All the perennials I ordered from them were cheaper, so I paid a smaller price for a smaller plant. I believe small is the norm with mail order, but the prices can vary. I avoid high-priced sellers. Bluestone is one with really high prices, for example. Burpee never had a stamp of confidence from me. Always felt like I would be a number and not a customer to them.

GH Wild was daylily and peony order during fall clearance, so I got tubers with eyes, and they were generous! Prices were amazingly low, and the tubers had plenty of eyes. I was very very pleased!

As a side note, I looooooove small plants. So much easier to plant in the ground, the root systems develop naturally in ground, and I don't mind waiting for performance. But, I won't buy expensive small plants!

And, I'll add that $20 for those sticks does seem exorbitant. What a review!

@FrozeBudd_z4 lol n I edited out as much swearing as I could. haha I swear its not dandruff, its pollen from the pussy willow lol, well mostly, probably. It's snowing here too in PA today. I cant imagine what it must be like in Canada. What is the temperature there?

deannatoby I love Peonies. I got some red ones from Aldi a few weeks ago n they were surprisingly nice for the price and being from a grocery store lol. I'll have to check out GH Wild in the fall.

I don't know anything about Burpee - but what stuck me was.... The big pots from the local places would have cost a fortune to ship! It is not surprising that mail order plants are small = lighter weight to ship so can be sold for lower prices. Wisterias grow fast so, as long as they are healthy plants, they will catch up to the big pots pretty quickly!

eta: one further thought occurred to me.... There is a Canadian mail order place that charges very high prices (IMO...). They are based in an area where there are not a lot of local nurseries and I suspect a lot of their customers live in areas where they wouldn’t be able to find anything but very mundane/common plants, so paying higher prices mail order is their only way to get many things. Those of us who live where there are good local nurseries are a bit spoiled I think :-). I wonder if that may be the sort of market/ customers that Burpee (and other high-priced mail order sources) focus on....?

woodyoak zone 5 Canada Thats a good point. I wish I would have waited n tried to get them locally. Most of my local places only seem to carry Floribunda and Sinensis, but I did find one place locally that is going to carry Blue Moon this year. Blue Moon seems like such a cool variety since it supposedly blooms multiple times. Does Wisteria do well in Canada? I'm in Northern PA, like 2 hours or so from Canada n my Japanese one did well when I planted it last year. It is still completely dormant though since Pennsylvania decided to become Antarctica instead of Spring lol

gardengal48 That's awful. One more reason to never order from Burpee Again. Did the nursery you mentioned ever reopen after it was sold? Its sad when places are just left abandoned like that.

It did reopen....but only as a display garden and event center. And is still undergoing renovation, although looking pretty good. Sadly, the nursery portion of the property is long gone. And at its peak, it was probably the best mail order nursery in the US.

T M - a good local nursery could probably order one in for you even if they don't usually carry it..... There's one local nursery here that does that for me if I'm looking for something that I can't find - they can usually find it at one of their suppliers.

Wisterias are sort of marginal here - they have good years and bad years depending on how nasty the winter was! One of May's garden routines here is checking the wisterias daily to see if the flowerbuds are developing. I'm not too optimistic that this will be a good year for them given how erratic the weather has been! Last year was bad for the Chinese one (I have both a Chinese and Japanese wisteria but not the American type.) The problem with the Chinese one last year was not the weather but the fact that we had given it a substantial 'haircut' in late summer to control its height (we grow both as 'trees'....) That prompted an outburst of foliage growth last spring which hid most of the flowers. We had to cut off a lot of the foliage to be able to see the flowers. We normally do that just for the Japanese one - which flowers after the foliage emerges - the Chinese one usually flowers before most of the foliage emerges.)

2013 was the last really outstanding year for them - although they do almost always produce some flowers! This picture is from 2013 - The Japanese one is in the foreground and the Chinese one is just finishing bloom at the other end of the bed:

This is the Japanese one a week ago:

And this is the Chinese one:

'Blue Moon' is what I'd probably grow if I was going to grow the American one - I no longer have the space or the time to take on a third wisteria! I did give a Blue Moon to a young friend a few years ago - she lives quite a bit north of here and Blue Moon is struggling to survive for her as she's really too far north, but she wanted to try one anyway. Good luck with yours.

woodyoak zone 5 Canada Your Wisterias are absolutely beautiful. They look so pretty as trees. My Japanese one is in vine form. I think I might try to train my Blue Moon ones into trees if they get past their twig phase lol. Thanks :)

YES, I’d be less than thrilled if I received two matchsticks like you did. Though as others have said, I’ve been spoiled by having some good garden centres around. Because when I have done mail order I’ve often been somewhat disappointed.

I never buy from Burpee, and their destruction of Heronswood Garden, one of the great gardens of the world, is only one reason.

I just received a large order from Bluestone. All the plants were purchased in Feb during their half off Friday sales. They are in excellent condition. I purchase locally whenever I can but do mail order when I don’t think I can find it nearby. Bluestone has a great quarantee, they will send replacement plants on your word .

I will buy seeds from Burpee. Even those are fairly high. But I haven't (and evidently won't?! after seeing these exemplar plants) bought plants, and will continue to buy from Bluestone. I haven't gotten plants from Select Seed, but I love their seeds so much, I probably will. Seems like they typically only have annuals I like? Actually, I don't know why. I'll have to give them another try. Good luck with your plants!

Burpees - asset stripping scum.

Coulda done your review, Timothy M, in around 3 seconds...but I am no stranger to the joys of withering invective so hey, rant on.

Stay away from White Flower Farms for perennials, same experience, big prices for miniature plants, spring bulbs were great.

Sherry

I won't even buy seeds there anymore, too many seed packs that were not what they were supposed to be. after they got Heronswood it all went south.

I agree that Burpee is terrible, their stock is untrustworthy and overpriced.

All the mail-order plants Ive ever gotten have been undersized and on the expensive side, and thats from several places. Only a few of them have actually thrived once planted. It took some searching but now I buy locally or drive an hour for things the nearby garden centers dont carry.

I will say, my sister in law got me a pack of burpee mammoth russian sunflower, and I put them out in soda bottles to germinate the first week of spring, and they sprouted immediately and are growing faster than literally everything else in the area.

Woodyoak is right. Shipping a "normal" container would cost a fortune. Any mail order plant is going to be SMALL. Most say on the website that it would be a 2.5" or 3" plant. But, I have ordered a few because I'm not longer doing the "I like that and that" trip to nursery, which always leaves me at home with plants that looked good at the nursery but really don't have a place in my garden. I choose what I want ahead of time and if it's only available by mail order, I do it. I just won't pay $15 for any mail order herbaceous perennial (so far). I want some Geranium phaeum, and they are nowhere in my area. Apparently they trended several years ago and their time is over. My choices are BlueStone for $15, or Digging Dog for $8. Given Digging Dog's price, their selections of eight cultivars, along with their stellar reputation, guess which I'm ordering from?

Along some same lines, I've got an order (to be delivered in May) at Cold Stream Farm in MI for bare root trees. They will be SMALL (supposed to be 3'), but they were $5-$8 a tree! $6 for a bare root 3' Eastern redbud vs $40 for the smallest pot at the nursery. So, I'm getting a small tree, but it will grow! I just can't argue with the price. And, I can't argue with the convenient of planting that smaller rootball in an established wood area. It's horrible to fight existing old roots when planting in a woodland. The less deep I have to dig the better.

Timothy, where you got walloped was you got a small plant AND a ridiculous price!

Again, Select Seeds, which has a great reputation, sent healthy plants. Every single one thrived, and an iffy zonal one did survive the winter. I think it also important to note that Select Seeds is close enough to me to be no more than a 2-day trip for the plants. It may have even been 1-day. When I order form Digging Dog they're going to travel about as far as they can to get to me. That's a long time in a box for plants!

I had to come back just so I could give a thank you to deannatoby for namedropping GH Wilds. Wow, beautiful... and they have a spring sale going on including a clearance and a bunch of discontinuing stuff right now. Their shipping and handling charges are very fair too. I'm working on an order. I adore irises, and lilies almost as much, and I have a large area I get to start planting in this year.. so this thread and suggestion is very timely.

I checked out Select Seeds too.... very tempting and good prices. But If I'm gonna toss my perennial pennies, they are going to the GH Wilds this time around.

@skip1909 I grew the Burpee Mammoth Sunflowers from seeds last year too. They were awesome. I also did the ones that were shades of red and orange and had multiple flower heads per a plant (I can't remember the name of them, they were Burpee too) and they did awesome as well, but I always have pretty good luck with sunflowers from any brand.

@beesneeds I was looking at their site yesterday, and I agree, they have an awesome selection of stuff. I think I'm ganna order some Hostas from them as I see they have some on clearance for a good price. I'm creating a shade/rock garden behind my new patio, and it wouldn't feel complete without a bunch of hostas lol.

This is completely off topic, but does anyone grow Yucca? I was thinking about growing some, but I heard their sharp af, and being as clumsy as I am, I dunno lol. Are they pretty easy to grow?

I have ordered perennials from Burpee once. Never again. I like Bluestone. Since I am planting a lot of stuff for butterflies and other pollinators, I love Almost Eden. Best customer service. Got an order from them today.

Timothy Michael, you are lucky to have Aldi's on several levels. I moved away from the South before Aldi's came my direction, unfortunately.

beesneeds and Timothy Michael, I'm glad you've found GH Wild. Just to let you know, I found it through the high recommendations of people on the peony forum in this discussion. Very happy to send them more business! Watch for fall sales, too.

I'm glad the Burpee seeds worked well. I would have no problems buying their seeds. Since they are a seed company I would think they have excellent seeds.

At least some yucca are really sharp, but I don't know if all are. However, they are deep-rooted and difficult to remove if you decide you don't want them.

I just received my delphinium order from Burpee and it wasn't bad. They were in 4" pots, I think. Four of them. I checked them today and everything is alive. Now I wonder what the heck happened to my salvia, Amistad, because they were not in the box and no mention on the order form. Gotta follow up with Burpee tomorrow.

My Amistad is still in deep dormancy (although the greggiis, microphyllas, stolonifera and pratensis are all awake and leafing up)...so maybe waiting until Amistad has broken dormancy. No obvious sign of life from Penny's Smile or involucrata either.

@NHBabs Sounds as bad as Horseradish with the deep roots. I planted some a few years ago, n now I cant get rid of it n it just tries to take over. At least Yucca gets pretty flowers tho lol. I'll just have to be completely sure where I wanna put it. I see a lot of people who live on my road plant it around electric poles

bella rosa Burpee does that a lot I heard. Its either the salvias were coming from a different warehouse or they are on backorder. Ive read about other people having stuff on backorder and Burpee not notifying them.

Tim, oh, really! That's not good. I'll contact them next week. I really want those darn salvias. LOL.

It's a good general rule to be wary of plant offerings from companies that made solid reputations by selling seeds. Burpee, Jung, Park's, Gurney's etc. all have ample online reviews criticizing the size and/or health of the perennials sold by them or their plant divisions (I got burned once by Jung et al). I'm not sure why established companies have such difficulty getting the hang of online plant selling - in some cases the lure of profits from selling dubious stock may just be too strong.

Blaming Burpee for the demise of Heronswood seems off-base though. It's not as if Dan Hinckley was forced at gunpoint to sell his nursery.

Whatever the limitations of online perennial ordering in general, it's the only way to go (in addition to raising from seed) if you want unusual or new offerings that local nurseries can't or won't sell. Even the best of my local garden centers have limited selections.

"Blaming Burpee for the demise of Heronswood seems off-base though. It's not as if Dan Hinckley was forced at gunpoint to sell his nursery."

Sorry, but you're not going to get much support for that premise. Of course he was not forced at gunpoint to sell but he did so with the understanding that the garden would remain intact. And on occasion, open to the public. It was what happened after the sale that has/had folks up in arms. Burpees ran the huge display garden into the ground. And there was a great deal of ill-will generated in the permanent closure which happened without notice to Dan or any of the employees (some of which were former Heronistas). They just came in one afternoon, terminated all the employees and padlocked the gates.

My 3 Salvia Amistads came today in a mildly beat-up box. The plants themselves are in beautiful shape, though! So where the 3 Golden Splendor Lily bulbs I got a few weeks ago. So, it can happen!

Timothy Michael, I wouldn't plant a sharp yucca near a utility pole since sometimes workers need to climb them and can't afford to have holes in protective gear. Also, don't plant near sidewalks or paths or anywhere someone might brush against it.

Or anywhere at all, really (smirk - a dead yucca fan speaks)

I’m in this situation with elephant ears (alocasia and colocasia). Most nurseries close to me don’t specialize in the different varieties that you need once you become obsessed.. the few that may do mail order are expensive, and often sending you a growing plant. But oddly enough, I don’t need the plant growing - I just want the dormant bulb as it’s easier to ship. The other side of this coin is that sometimes the bulbs aren’t dormant, they are dead, and other times they are not the specific variety that you want. And you don’t know until until months later! Last year at this time of year I did a spontaneous trip to an out of town nursery, and they did have some medium elusive varieties which were just pushing out of dormancy that they sold me at a discounted rate because they didn’t look great yet. Maybe time for another road trip....

I did get roses, hellebores, hydrangea, and clematis from Burpees this year in spite of bad experience from past years. They were much better from prior years. I had gotten very tiny plants like plug size from Burpees in past years that were in such bad shape that I had to return them for refund. It was that bad. Though I have to say that they have improved their quality a lot this year. Having said that, I would only buy their stuffs if they are on sale or they are not available elsewhere. The Austin roses that I got from them this spring were excellent and packed very well. They are starting to bud out now.

A bit more on the supposed evils of Burpee, lambasted as "cultural vandals" for deceiving poor Dan Hinkley and running Heronswood into the ground.

It turns out that after a few years, Burpee concluded the "experiment" wasn't working and offered to sell the place back to Hinkley and Robert Jones for less than half what they'd been paid for it ($5.5 million). They refused. Apparently they were no longer interested in running Heronswood, and an opportunity to preserve the jobs of its workers was lost (wonder if any of those employees ever shared in the $5.5 million bonanza).

So I find it difficult to sympathize with either of the major parties to this mess. Burpee was hoping to cash in on the cachet Heronswood had with gardeners to boost their plant business. Hinkley and his partner got to cash in, which was their right, but it was never a realistic expectation that a specialty place like that appealing to a limited group of devotees could ever be "taken national" (if that stated goal of Hinkley's ever existed). Too bad it didn't work out (in its last years before the sale to Burpee I'd noticed that Heronswood's offerings for some perennials I coveted had been markedly scaled back, for instance its once-massive selection of asters. Apparently Dan lost interest in maintaining varieties that resulted in only a handful of sales every year, just like Burpee).

http://gardenrant.com/2012/07/the-story-ends-well-for-heronswood.html

http://www.gardencentermag.com/article/heronswood-nursery-auction/

I’m going to plug GH Wild again (Gilbert H Wild and Sons). EVERY SINGLE peony I ordered from them last fall put out at least two blooms this spring. ALL of them! They were such healthy tubers, most having multiple eyes, and I was so thrilled to get blooms. I believe the norm is for bloom to skip a year while they establish. Our long, warm fall may have helped, too.

But, one of my peonies was NOT what I ordered. A coral colored peony ended up being white. They issued me a merchandise credit with no questions after I sent an email with a picture. I couldn’t resist, and just placed another order of some things I need, most of it much cheaper than I could find here. Very glad that part of their BOGO stock were things I need. Even the full price things I ordered were very reasonably priced. Will report on the plants when they arrive, but I am expecting more quality plants.