Comments regarding Santa Rosa Gardens

Apparently this company has changed it’s model. When I have ordered from them in the past, plants have been shipped promptly and were a generous size ready to plant. This year plants arrived almost six weeks after I placed my order and were just small plugs .... much too small to plant right away. Nothing was labeled. Hence I have no way of identifying those plants for which I ordered multiple varieties. Very disappointing and not worth what I paid.

"On May 3, 2020 10:00 AM, Santa Rosa Gardens responded with:

Thanks for your comments about your order and your plants. Santa Rosa Gardens has had to deal with some delays in April due to COVID-19 (mainly shortage of supplies and labor for packing orders), but we have been playing catch-up on orders and are now back to shipping heavily in May.

If there were any issues with your plants and packaging during April, please do let us know about it as we will do everything we can to correct the problem.

You are correct that Santa Rosa Gardens changed many things about its plant offerings. In the past, we potted up 4" pots and offered a very limited number of available plants for the season. This past year, we expanded our product line and began offering volume purchases in full plug trays at very reasonable per plant pricing. The demand for these trays was very high and we weer able to produce and offer greater volumes of plants in our greenhouse space. As a result of tremendous customer requests, we began to offer our plants in 3-packs as well as full trays for those who can't use that volume of plants, but are still looking for the unique and often hard to find varieties that we grow. These 3-packs are smaller in size than our 4" pots (they vary from 2" to 3.5" plug size, depending on variety), but are priced accordingly and are well below average market price. We do recommend these plants be potted up and grown out prior to direct planting in the landscape. Some customers do direct plant, but in those cases care must be taken to maintain the plants with adequate water as they establish.

We are excited to offer the volume of plants and the wide variety of plants to meet our customers needs. You can find more about our plants at the following link...

[HYPERLINK@santarosagardens.com]

Thanks so much for your patience and understanding and as always, happy gardening!"

Posted on April 23, 2015, updated September 19, 2017
I couldn't decide between neutral and negative. Today I received my first order from SR. The plants are great (large, healthy), and SR's prices are very good. The packaging, however, is the worst I've ever seen. Out of the 8 plants delivered, only 2 were still securely in their pots. The 3 agapanthus were all dumped out of their pots, with roots exposed. Another 3 had enough dirt dumped out that, while they were still in their pots, their roots were showing. The net sock over the plants does nothing to contain the soil. I don't know if I will order from them again.

"On Apr 30, 2015 6:55 AM, Santa Rosa Gardens responded with:

Thank you for providing us with feedback. We do appreciate hearing back from customers regardless of the good news or bad.

If you look at comments from most of our customers, I think you'll find that we (1) work very hard to develop packing methods that are effective and secure (2) back them up with quick and responsive service to any issue.

With 3rd party shipping, there is one certainty: some boxes will take what we like to call 'abnormal treatment' during transit. It takes some doing to knock the plants loose from our wrapping method, but if that happens, the box and plants will likely become a mess. Fortunately, that does not occur often.

If you notified sales of the issue, I am sure that you were told that we would gladly replace any damaged plants. If you did not notify sales, I urge you to make that contact. We stand behind our products, even during the shipping process. Thank you."

My first purchase from Santa Rosa in spring of 2014 was fine. No issues, so I decided to buy more items this spring. My order came and most of the plants were bone dry. The plants were poorly packaged as well. That combined with the bone dry soil and probably rough handling by the shipping service caused one of the plants to come out of its pot and dump most of the soil out in the box. Luckily, this plant was an echinacea and they can handle abuse. I repotted it and soaked the plants over night in a tub of water. All of them made it. I took a pic and sent them an email about it but no one ever got back to me. There are several other nurseries with a better selection and better packaging than this retailer. I don't really see a reason to purchase from them again.

"On Jun 2, 2015 9:09 AM, Santa Rosa Gardens responded with:

I apologize for any issues you had with your shipment and assure you that we will correct those problems. Please be sure to check your junk mail and add Santa Rosa Gardens to your 'safe senders list'. It would be very unusual for your shipping complaint to be overlooked. From your description, it sounds like the plants received less than normal shipping care in transit. 'Bone dry' and 'out of the pots' usually suggest that the plants sat in a hot truck for an extended period, and the box was mishandled along the way. Please give us a call and we will absolutely correct any issues with the shipment and send replacement plants as needed. We hope you give us an opportunity to prove you wrong regarding our packaging. We're quite proud of our methods and our success rate. Thank you."

I ordered Coreopsis 'Cosmic Eye.' They have sent it twice and I still don't have the correct plant. I don't like leaving negative feedback, but they seem to have a problem getting the correct plants sent out. Also, the other plants I received from them this year were tiny. Example: Hydrangea 'Zebra' - It was 3 inches tall and cost $9.99. It died and there was nothing I could do to save it. It was just a tiny cutting!

I was astonished to find small plugs removed from their containers and shipped with soil and roots showing. After my first email request, I was told that sometimes Santa Rosa will ship these small sprigs on a two for one basis rather than the usual 4 inch pot advertised on their website. My second conversation confirmed this practice was done without informing or giving a choice to the customer. To Santa Rosa's credit, after my second complaint, they offered to send me mature plants when they became available. The only way to prevent this from occuring again is to mark on each customer order "no two for one substitutions".

"On Apr 16, 2011 5:57 PM, Santa Rosa Gardens responded with:

I will certainly look into this. It is not our intention to ever ship plants bareroot, without pots. If soil and roots were showing, those plants were not shipped per our routine. The sales person was correct that there are times when we ship 2 or 3 smaller pots in place of the larger pot in order to fill a customer's order according to their planting schedule. Those are very rare instances and we always offer our 100% replacement/refund guarantee on all of our plants. Many gardeners have planting schedules and if 1 crop out of many is not ready yet, we want to give the gardener the best solution available. In that case, holding the entire order for 1 plant is not the best option. I hope that you will give those smaller plants a chance. We would also be happy to ship the larger pot as it becomes available. I believe that sales also offered you a full refund on those plants as well. I hope we have resolved this to your satisfaction. If not, please contact us and we will be happy to discuss the order further. Thank you for understanding."

I am not sure how a company can advertise having plants available for sale and then not have them. I understand that weather and other factors can impair crops but when it does, such particular plants should not be listed as available.
I had one such plant become unavailable from this company on my order and they wonderfully informed me of this. I chose to have the money I had already prepaid refunded.
Suddenly my order shipped with another item not included with no such gracious notice.
Oh I was notified that it would not be included, it would be shipped later. NOW, it will be shipped later again.
No option to refund this time.
I will await my tiny black sempervivum, however, I doubt that I will order from this company again without serious hesitation.
I believe they are a reputable company, but if I could not produce our tool for our customers when they ordered it, I would be out of buisness in very short order.
I do sincerely hope that whatever is causing these late or incomplete orders clear up for them.

"On Apr 28, 2009 4:54 PM, Santa Rosa Gardens responded with:

Thank you for posting your comments. I'm sorry to hear that you had a disappointing experience with your order. We do understand the importance of filling orders completely and on time and are equally disappointed when a crop issue doesn't permit us to meet those goals. Out of the plants you ordered on April 2, we did have an issue with the Sempervivum Black and the Echeveria Metallica, which are no longer available for order on our website. These particular succulents were not all finishing in the time we had hoped and we were forced to ship those that were ready on a first-order-in basis.

When a specific plant variety does not respond as expected and we unfortunately miss the target ready date, we aim to provide the best solution for the customer. Of the 1,000+ varieties of plants we produce, we are very pleased with the high level of accuracy we achieve in meeting requested ship dates.

We do ask that if any customer is concerned or disappointed with how we handled their order that they contact us and give us an opportunity to make it right. Most on-line mail-order nurseries ship product as they have it ready in spring, not according to a chosen ship date. While it is often a difficult task to manage, we are pleased to allow our customers to choose their ship week, and often the specific day in which they receive their plants.

Thanks for understanding and happy gardening!"

I need to say that the entire experience was definately not negative.
I ordered about $50 worth of grasses from them this spring.
The order arrived on time and was nicely packed. All plants were in pots.
The plants though were extremely small, many in 2" pots which I call liners.. Some grasses had only 3 blades and the grasses were not more than a few inches tall for a few. I wrote them back and they did replace one at that time that had died.
Later in the summer when they were still very small I wrote again and they replaced the entire order with, again, small plants.
I had never bought ornamental grasses before anywhere and got excited seeing the pictures on their site. If I had only waited till a little later in the spring I could have gotten very nice size grasses locally. I did in fact go to my local nursery and get big plants recently. The Santa Rosa product may someday grow but it looks like it will be many years before they get to the size that are sold locally for good prices.
I guess I learned that I need to be patient and wait for spring and not order in the winter.

"

I appreciate these comments, and all comments from our customers, positive and negative. This was a situation where the few varieties that were purchased happened to be varieties that we were having trouble with that season. When you grow the number of plants that we do, you will have some trouble crops. Any nursery that tells you otherwise...well...

Our goal through this type of problem order is to (1) provide our customer with plants that are viable and will grow. (2) to make sure the customer is pleased with the purchase and how the plants perform in their garden. (3) provide replacement/refund/or credit, whichever the customer prefers if the plants fail. We tried our best to provide the plants ordered and stood behind our guarantee with this customer.

In the fall of 2007, we switched to a larger sized pot for our perennials and grasses. This 4 inch round pot has a soil volume of 16 oz and is designed to give gardeners an even faster start with their plants.

Check out plant sizes here: http://www.santarosagardens.com/help_answer.asp?ID=19#110

Feedback on this new size has been fantastic, and we continue to offer our 100% satisfaction guarantee on all of our plants. Thanks!

"