Comments regarding Avant Gardens

I have ordered from Avant a gardens in the past and have generally never had a complaint. They have a nice selection of plants and the mail order experience was fine. In recent years, they seemed to do a deep dive into succulents, which is a plant category I’m simply not that interested in, so there seemed to be fewer new and unusual items in other categories I tended to follow.

However, today I have to post a comment not about their plants or their shipping but about the new website. For several days, I haven’t been able to get beyond the home page. Its not a WiFi issue, and I am up to date with my iPad updates. I am not having issues with any of the other online nurseries I follow, so I have to assume that the new Avant Gardens website has data-heavy features like stupid videos that play automatically (if I am interested in video, which I rarely am, I can click on it myself.)

Honestly, if you have to update your website, could you please provide an option that doesn’t force every casual visitor to deal with massive amounts of data? I much preferred the website Avant Gardens had 10 years ago which was simple yet effective. All I need to see is a genus list that I can click on if interested that maybe includes photos for each species or cultivar. I certainly don’t need to wait 5 minutes or more to load a page that gets me to the actual catalogue. I don’t know what Avant Gardens has on this “improved” website that takes so long to download, but I can go check out Far Reaches or Plant Delights or any number of other online nurseries without the wait.

Here’s a tip for Avant Gardens: gardening tends to skew to older ages. Much of your potential customer base is not going to have the latest digital tech or even be all that interested in flashy upgrades to a website. All I really need to see is what plants are on offer at the present time. If your website can’t manage that, I sure as hell don’t care about all of the other bells and whistles it might have.

Purchased a plant. Was told 9 days later that they only had one in stock and it wasn't in good shape. Appreciate that they didn't send me a plant in good shape, but wish it wouldn't have taken over a week for them to let me know.

I ordered from this company mainly because they had a Tricyrtis cultivar that I hadn't seen, and they had Geranium 'Pearl Boland,' which I was interested in growing. I ordered several other plants as well.

The plants were delivered promptly. 'Pearl Boland' was unavailable due to crop failure. The Tricyrtis was fine, and nice sized. All plants were healthy and are thriving.

The problem I did have was with Chrysanthemum 'Becky.' This is a common plant where I live, but I hadn't seen any at my usual shopping places, so I thought I'd add a few to my order. What I got was rootbound starter plants that had been recently potted up in bigger pots and sold as such. This seems - at the least - mildly deceptive. Furthermore they mentioned in a post on this site, that their shipping is high in part because they do not send bare-root plants. Well, fine - but considering that - what is the point of adding weight to your package other than to make your plants appear to be a bigger size than they are? Despite some additional tinkering needed to open up the bound roots, the plants are doing fine.

The plants that I have ordered from Avant Gardens have always been healthy, well-packaged, and have perfomed beautifully in the garden. I have absolutely no problem with the company's products or performance.
Why, then only a "neutral" rating?
Shipping charges, shipping charges, shipping charges!
To ship to Michigan, it is $10.00 base PLUS $2.00 per plant. To purchase online requires a $30.00 minimum purchase (about 7 plants).... that would be $24.00 shipping charge__ one of the highest I've found, and almost doubling the cost of the plants!
With shipping charges that high, I will probably be buying from other online sources.

"We've been questioned recently about our shipping charges and really would like to take a moment to address this. We do not build shipping into the cost of the plants, as many big nurseries do. Why not? We have many loyal customers who visit the nursery and pick up their plants, and feel it is unfair to hide shipping charges in the plant prices. Also we ship live plants, not bare roots. It is extremely important that we get plants to you healthy and safely. We do not propagate in large quantities and if a plant does not make it to your door safely in transit, we may not have another plant to replace it. We therefore use only a shipping service that guarantees the plants will get to your door in 2-3 days maximum. We are in Mass. and UPS Ground, which is the most economical service, is reliable for us only in the northeast states.

We try to cover our costs by the rates we've structured. Not only do we have to buy boxes and packing material, but we take extra time in packaging our plants for shipment. For a box of 10 plants it takes at least a half hour to package. This doen't include paperwork, or the time to select the healthiest, best plants. Most importantly, UPS rates go up constantly and we get surcharges on our bill whenever the gas prices go up.

Mail order is a service and if we want to continue to offer this service, we can't continue to lose money doing it. The nursery business is risky enough, and we want to be honest with our customers as to where the costs are coming from.
Katherine Tracey
Avant Gardens"