A New Series: Where Do You Get Your Plants?

Where do Alert Gardeners get their plants? And more and more plants? I've been pondering that question and mulling it over with my gardening buddies and I've got five categories, each of which warrants its own discussion, each of which has its own pros and cons. Here they are, roughly in order of the number of plants they move from greenhouse to the vast global public:

1. Big Box Stores
2. Small Box Stores
3. Local and specialized nurseries
4. Online
5. Plant/Garden shows and friends.

I've found plants through every one of these venues, so I can speak to each from personal experience, as well as dig up some intriguing, journalistic factoids for y'all. But first, any categories that I've missed? I'm not going to include collecting from the wilderness, of course, because so many useful and beautiful plants are disappearing from the wild, it's become a very complicated subject and way beyond the scope of this blog.

Girasole, MR