Is it here yet?
I hurry down the stairs to peer through the a clear section of the leadlight glass panel in my front door and eagerly scan the portico outside for my much awaited package.
Nope. Not yet. Maybe tomorrow.
"YES!!" I punch the air with the enthusiasm of a bowler who has just taken a wicket and stolen victory in The Ashes, it's finally arrived. After a week or more of anticipation, my new frangipani is waiting on my doorstep.
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My new Frangipani Salsa, closely resembles a stick at this stage |
Whilst buying plants by mail order is not a new concept, the internet has taken it to a whole new level.
As a newly wed, in our first home, gardening mail orders were available, although these were mostly limited to spring bulbs and bare-rooted roses and on those horrible, humid days in late February/early March, I would sit indoors and pore over the catalogues, fill out my order form and post it, dreaming of how beautiful my garden might look next spring/summer.
Many, many years later mail order catalogues do still exist, although ordering through websites is much more common.
The internet has radically changed how the mail order plant companies do business. A website can be constructed and maintained relatively cheaply and often by people without extensive computer training and thus many smaller specialist nurseries can sell via the internet, giving them access to additional business, way outside their local geographic area. This means that businesses can be working and raising their stock well away from metropolitan areas and still sell their products to a wide range of customers, provided they have access to a reliable delivery network. In fact this is the primary means of selling for some businesses.
For consumers these are very exciting times. We now have access to many more gardening options than ever before. We can research pretty much anything and everything in our own time and our own homes.
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Jasminum Sambac at the Sydney Botanical Gardens |
On a visit to the Sydney Botanical Gardens, I noticed an adorable form of Jasmine that I had not seen before so I took a photo of the plant and its label, and was able to do a quick search on my computer that night and find that the Mudbrick Cottage Nursery in Queensland had them in stock. A couple of clicks later and I've bought a couple of plants and they are on their way to me!
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My Jasminum Sambac with a few months of growth |
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The fragrance of these flowers is exotic,
evoking the taste of my favourite tea,
Green Dragon Eyes (with Jasmine) |
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The flowers turn a delightful shade of aubergine as they age |
There are online forums for people to ask gardening questions and have other internet users share their own experiences, not to mention websites that cater to bloggers who want to share their own garden pictures and information with their family, friends and even with people all around the world whom they have never met.
But the internet has put pressure on the traditional garden nurseries, many of whom have also gone electronic (to some extent) and developed their own online campaign strategies to reach us through the internet.
What are pluses and minuses to buying over the internet?
On the plus side is the convenience. You can shop at any time of the day, or night, in the comfort of your own home. You can shop for bargains and you can spend hours researching, if you want to, before making a purchase and your new plants will be delivered to your door. This can be a great way to obtain lots of plants at relatively cheap prices.
On the minus side, the plants you buy will frequently be quite small so the "bargain" you think you are getting may take a year or more to reach the same size as that plant you saw in your local nursery. It also may not flower for a season or two and should you have a problem, you'll probably won't get the same level of advice from your internet supplier that you would from your local nursery, who has experience with the conditions in your area and therefore in your garden.
This is a recent internet plant purchase. It consists mainly of 5cm tubers that arrived packed in their fully customised plastic transit containers. It's amazing just how small and insignificant my new plants look in their tiny tubes and travel packaging.
And even more amazing how much bigger these same plants look once potted up into larger containers.
Potting up tubers is one of my favourite garden things to do, perhaps this is why I tend to buy so many plants this way.
I love taking the tiny plants and placing them into bigger lodgings and moving them to my sheltered new plant area where they can grow a little bigger and get used to being Sydney plants before they are launched into the garden.
Because my garden is still a fair way from being ready for them to move in, they have the luxury of having some growing time before they need to be planted.
4 months on my Frangipani stick has grown some leaves.
Because these are tropical plants, I won't be planting this baby until next spring, when all risk of frosts has passed. In the interim I can move the pot around, into a more protected place should I need to.
In a few weeks these leaves will fall and I will once again have a Frangipani stick but the reward will be greater next spring/summer when I might even be favoured with some flowers!
I chose to buy "Salsa" frangipani via mail order rather than simply buying a plant from the nursery up the road (for about the same price I could have bought a bigger plant [with lots of leaves and maybe also with flowers]), because I had very specific size requirements and most generalist nurseries only stock a limited range. It will be planted in my front garden in an area that has limited space In years to come it will provide summer shade to plants beneath and protect them from searing midday sun, which a frangipani will love. It will happily absorb whatever the sun throws at it and in winter it will shed its leaves and the plants beneath will receive the gentler winter sun. Anything growing larger than about 3-4 metres high x 3-4 metres wide would be too big. "Salsa" is said to grow to 3 metres high x 3 metres wide (in tropical Far North Queensland) so maybe a little less in Sydney, Most full sized frangipanis grow up to 5 metres, or more and the dwarfs around 1-2 metres so "Salsa" is a good choice for this space. Frangipanis are tough once established and quite drought tolerant, their root system is compact and non-invasive and they strike easily from cuttings.
Sacred Garden Frangipanis in QLD offers an enormous range of frangipanis, including dwarf and evergreen varieties, for sale, which they have sourced from all over the world. They also provide lots of helpful information for each cultivar. If frangipanis are your passion then their website is definitely worth a look.
I'm essentially a patient gardener. I have realised that
gardening is a lot like life. We need to enjoy the journey rather than
the completion (for who wants their life to be completed?) and although we
need to have long and short term plans and goals for both our gardens and our
lives, progress is better measured over months and seasons rather than
over days and weeks and we should try to find the time to enjoy and appreciate at least one thing each day.
Oh, and we mustn't forget to take lots of "before" photos because it's important to keep on looking back over our shoulders just so we can see how far we've come.