Comments regarding Lauray of Salisbury

I ordered 16 Rhipsalis cuttings from this company this past summer. After waiting a long time and getting no acknowledgement of order nor receiving any cuttings, I attempted to contact them via email, and received no response.

Since it had been so long, and there was no communications, I placed the order with another company (Bob Smoley Garden World). Lauray's order finally arrived about 2 days before the order from Garden World, leaving me with some duplicated items.

The Lauray order was packed in a large box full of newspaper. As I carefully unpacked, I finally figured out that some of the newspaper contained the plant cuttings, but only after some of the newspaper (and cuttings) had gone into the trash bag. So I went through all of the newspaper several times to make sure that I had all of the cuttings. After checking several times, I determined that I only had 15 of the 16 cuttings ordered. No detailed statement of what was ordered and what shipped was included, so I could not determine the cause of the shortage. Cuttings were nice, much bigger than those received from Glasshouse, and slightly less (but comparable to Garden World) and in good shape.

Cuttings were accompanied by handwritten plastic labels. I discovered after planting, that the writing on the labels was running from misting/moisture, so had to relable all of the plants and barely got to them in time to avoid losing some ID's on the plants.

If I were rating this company solely on the basis of the plants, I would give it a positive for size, health and selection. However, taking into account the lack of communication, missing item, long delay and packing concerns, I finally settled on a negative. This was not an easy decision. It didn't help that I ordered elsewhere much later and received that order at basically the same time as the one from Lauray.

In the future, I would order from this company only if they were the only source for something.

I've read all the glowing posts about Lauray's and considered not posting, but in the end I decided I would post. I ordered hoyas from Judy last fall, after waiting quite a while for the order, I called a couple of times to ask when she thought she would be able to send them. The answer I kept getting was that she was waiting to ask the inspector to come out, she didn't want him to come for merely my order. Finally when I told her it was getting too cold to be shipping, she sent them. A couple of them were mislabelled but I didn't think that was a big deal, but what I found later was that all of her plants were totally infested with scale!! I lost over half of the plants I got from her due to the scale, and when I contacted her about what was going on she basically told me that it's too hard for her to keep the bugs off since her greenhouse is attached to her house. WHAT?! Does that make sense to anyone?! The least she could have done was inform me from the begining that she was dealing with bugs and let me decide if I wanted to have them sent to me or not! I never got an apology or an offer to replace what was lost from the scale, nothing! She got my money so she didn't care what happened after that. I don't know what her other plants look like, maybe they are in a different greenhouse, but I would caution anyone who does order from her, carefully inspect any plants you get from this dealer, and be prepared to be totally ripped off if anything goes wrong with your order!