Part II of our series on gardening and Gen X/Y will air later this summer. Stay tuned!
If you’ve been a plant geek for any length of time, odds are you’ve found yourself poring over a sexy catalog promising live plants by mail. Despite mail-ordering plants as often as I have, I’m still struck by what a dubious prospect it is.
For the most part, plants are meant to be connected to the ground, right? Is it crazy we pack these earth-dwellers in boxes and send them flying across the country–indeed, the world–to be planted someplace else? In this month’s episode, I take a look inside the business of mail-order plants in a conversation with Tony Avent of Plant Delights Nursery in Raleigh, N.C., known to many gardeners not only as a mail-order nursery, but for its wide selection of wacky plants–which, in turn, attract some wacky customers.
| Links mentioned in this podcast… Plant Delights Nursery |
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“We had an elderly customer who would place orders and always say that half of the plants were dead when they arrived,” he says. “That was her m.o. We got a point where we would just send her money back and say, ‘Thank you, but we can’t accept your order.’ She’d send it back the next day with more plants added!”
I also talk to the staff at Fine Gardening (mail-order plant geeks themselves) about their thoughts on the prospect of plants by post, and how visiting a mail-order nursery in person is sometimes very, very different from perusing that same nursery’s catalog.
Music from this podcast by ccMixter user Pitx.
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