Review of Wayside Gardens
December 1997
by Steven C. Chamberlain
105 Academy Street
Manlius, NY 13104
Steve_Chamberlain@isr.syr.edu
Wayside Gardens
Hodges, SC 29695-0001
(800) 845-1124
www.waysidegardens.com
Full Color Catalog - Free
I imagine all of you already get the Wayside Gardens catalog considering that it is fully illustrated in color. The question is, how many of you have ever ordered hostas from Wayside Gardens?
In the past, I have bought the following hostas from Wayside Gardens:
I will be sending in an order for 1998 for H. 'Sunshine Glory' because the price is right and I don't have that cultivar yet.
Judging from my experience with hostas and other plants, I suspect Wayside Gardens is, at least in part, simply a retail clearing house for products grown by wholesale suppliers, rather than a true nursery. Last fall, for example, I ordered four kinds of hardy lily bulbs and they came in four different little boxes over a period of a month when they arrived from the suppliers, I suspect, rather than because that was the best way to pack them for shipment to me. I have had mixed experiences with the two hosta orders I have placed. The first plant of H. 'Solar Flare' arrived in early Spring in a dormant condition that later turned out actually to be a dead condition. After waiting until July for it to emerge, I called them to ask for a replacement and was told that it would not be available again until the Fall. I then wrote clarifying my request to emphasize that I did not want another dormant crown, but wanted a plant with leaves that I could be certain was alive and well. Indeed, in September, a very nice H. 'Solar Flare' arrived which has subsequently grown into a nice clump in my garden. Last winter, Wayside Gardens was the first catalog to arrive to offer the new sport, H. 'Little Sunspot' (and at a very competitive price). My order for three of these hostas arrived in the Spring as very nice, quite large tissue-cultured plants that took right off and prospered. Their hostas are probably all tissue cultured and are shipped in pots, sometimes dormant and sometimes with leaves, except for H. 'Royal Standard' which is shipped bare root.
The 1998 Catalog has 130 full-color pages. There are three+ pages of hostas that contain 18 cultivars. Among these are H. 'Abba Irresistable', H. 'Solar Flare' and H. 'Sunshine Glory'; none of which could be considered widely available according to the 1997 Hosta Finder. On the other hand, the hosta featured as "new, rare, and choice" is "H. fluctuans 'Variegata'". It seems to me that Wayside Gardens is something of a bridge between specialty gardeners and the rest of the world. If the general public is to be introduced to hostas this way, I must admit the selection they offer is pretty enticing the catalog reader can't miss the fact that hostas aren't all green or blue (or green and white like H. 'Undulata Univittata'). On the other hand, their occasional misuse of the nomenclature is enough to give Warren Pollock a stroke!
Plants are priced in a rather narrow range $4.95 for H. 'Royal Standard', a Wayside introduction, to $34.95 for the several most expensive. This results in their prices being significantly lower than the average price in the 1997 Hosta Finder for some cultivars, but rather high for others. Given that their hostas are relatively young tissue-cultured plants, there are only good values here if you know what the rest of the market is. Orders are processed quickly and efficiently. Plants are shipped at an appropriate for your zone (or later if not yet available), which always has been an acceptable date in my experience. Credit cards are accepted and are charged when the plants are shipped rather than when they are ordered.
All of the plants I have received from Wayside Gardens, whether hostas or other things, have been correctly labeled so far as I can determine.
The total range of plants in the catalog is quite impressive. I typically browse the Wayside Catalog when I'm contemplating purchasing my first whatever to see what it looks like, what some of the selected cultivars are, and what an average-to-high retail price might be. Then, I try to find it somewhere else for less and only order from Wayside Gardens when this search fails. Each year there always seems to be something I end up needing from Wayside so either I'm not very good at finding alternatives or their success is based upon their really knowing the market.
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