In article ,
"Cereus-validus" wrote:

If the plants were any good, they would have been vigorous when you bought
them without the need to coax them along for years.

Oh, I dunno. There are a few top-flight nurseries that sell mostly only
seedlings, especially those who are doing mail order or growing extremely
rare cultivars, & they just don't sell them more mature than that. They
expect their customers to be able to baby mere seedlings for a couple of
years, though people without coldframes or greenhouses end up buying them,
plop them immature or unhardened right into the garden, where they get
baked to death within the week.

Buying sick plants is a foolish thing to do regardless of your ultimate
results. The risks far outweigh any possible reward, especially when you are
buying generic plants of little value in the first place.

Depends on what means "sick." Plants that look like hell in their nursery
pot are often merely at the end of their ideal season, or got battered
while exposed to weather & mishandling, or were visited by one industrious
little snail, so the nursery marks them down from $12 to $2 to get rid of
them. If there's no reason to suspect an actual disease, buying
worn-out-looking plants can be great.

Lowes, Home Depot, KMart, etc. get excellent plants. If you buy them
before they kill them, you too can get an excellent plant. The growers
that these chains use are top notch. They produce a quality plant. The
trick is to get them before they are abused.

Many of the mass-produced plants & Perennial of the Year award-winners are
chosen & developed not because they are genuinely superior garden plants
(some are, many are really not so good) but because they are very
responsive to mass-production. The Perennial of the Year winners in
particular are voted on by production-growers who are looking for plants
that respond to chemistry for rapid mass production, or can be forced to
bloom ahead of their natural schedule to get a jump on sales, or are
sterile so that amateur gardeners can't grow them themselves from seeds, &
last a long time in pots under nursery conditions.

A plant that meets all those criteria isn't invariably as good a choice
for the garden as it was for wholesale production & retail presentation.
Many far better garden plants are never going to hit the mass-production
outlets merely because they don't "dress" well in pots (but are fabulous
in gardens), or break easily in shipping, or wilt the first day chainstore
workers forget to water anything, or grow so swiftly they don't look
properly dressed a week after shipment to chain stores.

The criteria for the Award of Garden Merit by commparison has nothing to
do with the needs of wholesale growers or retail outlets, but have
criteria strictly related to their benefits, beauty, & ease of growth in
the garden. More of these will be found through independent nurseries
which are not as reliant on mass production lines to sustain their stocks.

In any case these potted plants are never as good as a field grown
plant.

Actually, there are many plants that resent being dug out of the ground
(from perennials with wide-spreading roots or deep taproots, to weeping
twisted beech trees), & will do MUCH better if pot-grown before placed in
their permanent locations. Even some easy bedding plants home-grown from
seeds should be started in pots so they won't undergo the shock of being
dug out of the ground before going into permanent locations, such as
poppies.

As for field-grown plants that do transplant well, some will be superior,
others won't. I've seen field-grown rhodies carefully developed to a
mass-production standard for shipment to the likes of Lowes. Of a hundred
shrubs sent to market, they all have one identical look to them, & are
devoid of individuality or character. To me these are ho-hum shrubs though
perfectly healthy & all that. Then again, some of the shrubs I've gotten
from small growers active in the Rhododendron Species Foundation let their
shrubs develop quite naturally, & these back-acre half-wild specimens
often have a great deal of individual character & are already very used to
exposure to the elements, unlike some greenhouse-grown dwarf rhodies that
are marketed without being hardened off enough to face the elements.

-paghat the ratgirl

--
"Of what are you afraid, my child?" inquired the kindly teacher.
"Oh, sir! The flowers, they are wild," replied the timid creature.
-from Peter Newell's "Wild Flowers"
Visit the Garden of Paghat the Ratgirl: http://www.paghat.com