Gardening With A Click

Once in a while you get lucky. This is a column about how I may have gotten lucky, but it will take a few years to be sure. In the meantime, I want to tell you the long story of how this luck may have come to me.On a cold, snowy Saturday in January, I sat down at my computer with my collection of 2015 plant and seed catalogs splayed across the dining room table. At my computer I summoned up my wish list of shrubs and perennials that I’d accumulated as planting candidates for this year, and I began to get to work.

It’s not an easy job for, as you have already learned, I am a plant addict. In the previous year I’d kept a list of plants that I lust for based on articles I’d read in magazines, plants I’d seen on garden tours, plants that I bought one of in 2013 and now I want more, many more of, and plants that other gardeners tell me about. The list started out with a mere 40-something candidates, and that alone foretells of the challenges ahead, as it easily translates into no less than 120 holes that have to be dug, labels that have to be made, computer entries that have to be remembered and weeks of watering and tending.

But once I had added all the plants with Post-its and turned-edge catalog pages and multiple circles on pages where originally only one plant was noted … well, the list quickly grew to 63 varieties. This in a year when I was determined to slow things down.

So I set up a spreadsheet. Each candidate was listed and there was a corresponding column for the vendor that would have that plant and then another column for cost per plant and then the same thing for a second vendor who might have the same plant in another size at another price. Yes, there is a method to my madness, but it’s still madness.

And as I worked down the list problems began to show up. I’d thought my notes were pretty complete and that it would be easy to find a source for each plant, but I was drawing blanks for some, like Heuchera Purple Plum, Tiarella Crow Feather and Uvularia grandiflora. They weren’t in my catalogs, not in my database and not showing up online. Then I remembered davesgarden.com. This website has come in very handy a number of times when I’ve wanted to see what other gardeners thought about a particular plant, and what the hardiness range of a plant was—not based on a catalog’s guesses, but based on real gardeners’ experiences. But Dave’s Garden’s extensive plant database also allows you (me) to go to a page (plantfiles) and hit a button on the left side called “specific search.”

When you click on that button, it takes you to a form called “searching the plant files,” and here you can enter what you know, such as genus, species and/or cultivar. Great: I enter Tiarella in the “genus” box, then Crow Feather in the cultivar box, hit the “search” button, and wham bang I got a “hit” or “return” … it found my plant. It tells me that the plant was hybridized in 2000 by Heimes, and it gives me the plant patent number. But above that, the plant name appears in purple and it’s clickable, so I click on it and I get a page of pertinent information about the plant and a picture as well as a review of the plant from someone who’s actually grown it for two years and wants to plant more she’s so pleased with it.

But even better, or at least as good, there’s a note at the top of the page that says “2 vendors have this plant for sale.” I click on that and it shows me a grower in Oklahoma that has it for sale and one in Virginia. I pick the Virginia vendor simply because it’s closer for shipping and closer in hardiness zone. I click on that link and it takes me to the website of Lazy S’S Farm and Nursery and sure enough they have the plant, the price is very reasonable and I place my order. I’ve never dealt with them before, though, so I go back to Dave’s Garden, where I can do a search on this nursery to find out what experiences other gardeners have had with them. There I get dozens and dozens of reviews from gardeners from Oregon to New York and all points in between and the reviews are absolutely glowing. The statistics show that this nursery has gotten 568 positive reviews and only 12 negatives. And in the past 12 months 43 positives and no negatives. I placed my order.

But this story doesn’t stop there. Dave’s Garden turned out to be an invaluable resource and I still had a few plants to find so I went through the process again. Lo and behold … Lazy S’S showed up as the vendor again, so I placed yet another order with them. But this time this addict had to look a bit further and I began to delve into the Lazy S’S website (lazyssfarm.com) and once again, I hit gold. This nursery, which I had never heard of before, offers more than 2,000 perennials, with more than 200 of them being new this year (new to them, anyway). Now that, my fellow gardeners, is a very impressive plant list.

Lazy S’S is a family-run nursery (the best kind), and one of the first things you learn by looking at their home page is that the nursery is for sale. So if you’ve been hankering to get into the business and want to move down to Virginia, here’s your chance. They say not to worry … they’re not going to sell out and give up, just waiting for the right buyer they feel will continue on and make them proud. But for the foreseeable future, this place is a gold mine for us plant addicts. Be patient though. There are lots of pages of plants to scroll through and not all of them are hardy up here, though most are. So, thanks to Dave’s Garden for being a great resource and thanks to Debbie and Pete for Lazy S’S. Oh, and if you decide to buy the place, Debbie and Pete would love to stay on and help out. To check out Dave’s Garden, just go their website, davesgarden.com, and take a tour. It’s a site with lots of features, so spend some time and explore it. Keep growing.