Buying Plants Online: What Actually Arrives in the Box
A plant photograph on a website shows a mature specimen in flower. What arrives may be a seedling in a small pot, a dormant root with no leaves, or something in between — and all three can be exactly what you ordered. The difference is in the specification, which is usually stated and usually skimmed.
What the terms mean
- Plug plants — small seedlings in modular trays. Cheapest per plant, need growing on before they go outside, and easy to lose if you are not set up for them.
- Potted, by litre — a 9cm pot is a young plant; a 2 litre is established; a 5 litre or more is close to what the photograph shows. The pot size, not the price, tells you what you are getting.
- Bare root — dormant, no soil, no leaves. Looks alarming and is usually the best value for roses, hedging and fruit trees. Sold only in the dormant season and must be planted promptly.
- Root ball — dug with soil and wrapped, used for larger evergreens and hedging. Heavy, seasonal, and needs planting quickly.
- Bulbs, corms, tubers — graded by size, and size genuinely correlates with first-year flowering.
Judging a seller before you order
- Do they state pot size or plant age? A listing that gives neither is hiding the thing that determines value.
- Do they state a dispatch season? Bare root and root ball are seasonal. A seller offering them year-round is worth a second look.
- What is the arrival guarantee? Plants can be damaged in transit. A stated policy — a window in which you report damage and what happens then — is the single most useful thing on the page.
- How do they pack? Good sellers describe it. Plants shipped loose in a box arrive as soil in a box.
- Do reviews mention condition on arrival rather than the plant's eventual performance? That is the part the seller controls.
What to do when the box arrives
- Open it the day it arrives. Plants in a sealed box deteriorate quickly, and most arrival guarantees have a short reporting window.
- Water immediately. Almost everything arrives dry.
- Photograph anything damaged before you unpack further, while the packaging is still evident.
- Do not plant straight into full sun. Plants raised under cover need a week or two of gradual exposure before they can handle outdoor conditions.
- Bare root goes in the ground quickly, or gets heeled into soil temporarily. It does not wait.
Where online buying beats a garden centre
Range, mostly. Specialist nurseries sell varieties no general retailer stocks, and bare root prices online are frequently well below potted equivalents locally. Hedging and fruit trees in quantity are cheaper to buy bare root by post than potted by car.
Where a garden centre wins is anything where you want to see the plant — a specimen shrub, a tree that will be the focal point of a garden, or anything where size and shape matter to you specifically.
Timing
Bare root season runs through the dormant months, and that is when the prices are lowest for the plants sold that way. Potted plants are most expensive at peak spring demand and cheapest in late-season clearance. Buying perennials in autumn clearance and planting them straight away is one of the few genuinely reliable savings in gardening.
Before you order
Check the pot size, the dispatch season, and the arrival guarantee — in that order. Check whether delivery is charged per order or per item, since plants are often shipped in multiple boxes. And check the mature dimensions on the listing, because the most expensive mistake in plant buying is a shrub that turns out to be twice the size of the space you had for it.