buying plants

Wilkinson' s.Morrisons etc and try your local boot sale, farmers market and market day and check out whether there is a small local nursery.
Good luck.

i absolutely love ebay i get most of my plants from there if you shop around you can get some really good bargains, hope this helps :o)

For bedding plants and the like Arlene is right - for anything else I would want to buy either from a reputable nursery.

You get what you pay for.

I have found the quality of the plants and related products I bought from of B&Q, Lidl and Morrisons to be excellent, but beware of Jersey Plants Direct. Don't know about the quality of their products, but their administration is dire. So I have now switched back to Gardening Direct, which has always served me well in the past, but which now charges £3.95 p&p per order.

I personally wouldn't even buy buy bedding plants from our local Lidl, B & Q or Tesco - they are poorly grown and badly cared for. There are other stores in the same chains that do a better job or so I am told.

I am sorry that Moon grower appears to have had bad experiences with my recommendations. The only comment I would add to my earlier one is that it is best if you get to Lidl on the day of delivery - be it a Sunday or a Thursday when their new stock comes in; the newsletters advise well in advance. I can only repeat, and I have no axe to grind, that garden and indoor plants I have bought at the Lidl, B&Q and Morrisons in Carlisle have always been excellent. Should they ever fail to please me, the shops are near enough to complain face to face, or to their head offices if that fails; you can't do that with mail order Jersey companies.

i have a beautiful Clematis that was from Morrisons and this year its going to be even better! choose your plants carefully always go for the healthiest and strongest looking, i on the other hand would not use Gardening Direct again bought a Clematis from them and its awful, got my money back in the end! but then its all down to experience isn't it, someone on another question said they would never use J.Parker bulbs again yet i use them a lot!!!

~last year I bought lots of plants from Van Meuwens and Thompson and Morgan~thay arrived really late and were very poor and I have bought good stuff from ebay but you need to be careful as to what you are getting and the postage costs.

Leone, I said 'I wouldn't buy from our local Lidl...' not that others should not buy from Lidl, indeed if you read an earlier post of mine in this thread I agree with Arlene that by-an-large buying bedding plants and the like from Lidl and co. works. But none of our local supermarkets/B&Q type places care for the plants properly - I had sharp words with the staff at Lidl who had dying plants sitting in their store - they appeared to have no idea that they needed watering!
To put my view in perspective you have to understand that, aside from our veggies, Bulbaholic and I are totally obsessed with alpine and woodland plants, this means buying from specialist (i.e. expensive) nurseries to get the choice plants or growing from seed. We have a few nurseries we buy from - mostly at Scottish Rock Garden Club Shows [http://www.srgc.org.uk/] where the specialist alpine growers sell, or mail order from those whom we personally know (for example Jacque Amand for Arisaemas), we also grow a huge amount from seed - in reality this is often the only way for us to grow the plants we desire. So, I do recognise that I come from a totally difference space with regard to gardening - I don't want 'cheap and cheerful' (though I think it can look great), bedding plants, annuals, herbacious perennials... the list of plants B & I don't and wont grow is huge. I totally respect other folk and their different desires can ohh and ahh over the pix of their garden but for me... nah.

Can you travel out of town? I buy loads of plants at local plant fayres, fetes and open gardens.