If you can’t trust the local nursery, whom can you trust?
As a novice gardener, I’ve come to rely on my local plant stores and
nurseries to tell me like it is - giving me advice on alien-looking
succulents and finicky ferns. But lately, as I research my new plant
purchases, more and more I’m realizing that I don’t have the plants I
thought I was buying. In fact, a lot of the time, my favorite plant
stores are dropping the ball and mislabeling the plants!
It’s not as bad as baby switching at the hospital but it comes close.
 CASE 1: I come home with a newly purchased Miniature Jade Tree.
I coddle it like I do any other jade plant, making sure I don’t
overwater it and that the plant gets plenty of bright sunlight. Then the
growth comes to a screeching halt and I wonder what I’m doing wrong. So
I go to my trusty books of advice - Jack Kramer's book Easy-Care
Guide to Houseplants, Maggie Stuckey’s The Houseplant
Encyclopedia and Ortho's All About Houseplants.
Soon I realize that I don’t own a Miniature Jade Tree at all but I’m the
proud mama of an Elephant Bush (Portulacaria afra). They look slightly
similar, so I can see where a busy nursery person might just slap a jade
tree label on it and think nothing of it.
 CASE 2: Ever since I got a vintage Time Life book on cacti and
succulents, I’ve wanted a Donkey’s Tail (Sedum morganianum) plant. I
find a sunny place for it on the windowsill and go to my favorite plant
store in the Castro to pick one up. After a few weeks of having it in
the sunniest part of the window I notice that the poor thing isn’t doing
so well. It looks like it might be getting sunburned, so I race to my
books and read. Sure enough, it doesn’t like bright light because it’s
not a Donkey’s Tail, it’s a different succulent all together:
Pachyphytum plant. And this plant prefers dappled sunlight.
I’ve also come across real plant stores (not Ace Hardware or the
Wal-mart impulse-buy plant area) that don’t seem to bother giving you
the exact name of the plant, just the plant family. I once bought a
plant from another hoity-toity Santa Cruz nursery that merely labeled
the plant Sedum. Do you know how many kinds of sedum plants are out
there? A lot, that’s how many. That’s like simply labeling the plant
“Herb” or “Cactus” or “Plant.” Ugh. Even the check out guy at the
organic store in Felton got miffed when he saw that the store was
selling herb plants with the label of “Basil.”
“Do you realize that there are over 100 types of basil being grown in
this country alone?” he asked when he saw the plant label.
“You sound like you know a lot about herbs?” I said.
“Yeah well with a Masters degree in Horticulture you’d think the guys in
back would bother asking me which kind of basil it was before
they labeled it,” he replied in a wounded tone.
I don’t know if I felt worse for the shoddy labeling or the fact that
this expert in herbs could only put his Horticulture degree to good use
as an organic market cashier. Maybe if this guy were calling the shots
at my favorite plant store, I wouldn’t be coming home with the wrong
plants. Oh well.
Here’s a recent list of plants I’ve bought in the last month
(I really hope they are labeled correctly):
- Pony Tail Palm - a succulent palm that has a base that looks
a little like an elephant’s which is why it’s sometimes referred to as
the “Elephant Foot Tree.” These suckers can grow to be six feet tall!
- Dinner Plate/Flapjacks Plant - a succulent that has large
flat leaves resembling small dinner plates. Labeled as Kalanchoe
thyrsiflora, I hope I got what I paid for. This plant can grow up to 24
inches tall if I don’t manage to kill it.
- African Milk Tree - actually this cactus isn’t mine, it’s my
roommate’s, but I try to take care of it when I mess around with my
other succulents. “It’s managed to take a lot of abuse and still
survive,” says Rob. Just don’t break off a part by accident or it oozes
this milky substance that stings your skin. Ouch.
A SIDE THANKYOU: By the way, thanks to everyone who gave me handy
pointers on how to deal with the hungry deer that eat all my outside
plants like it’s a Stuckey’s diner for wildlife. So far these are the
suggestions I’ve gathered: pinwheels near the plant to scare off the
deer, beaten eggs around the plants to ward them off by smell and human
hair (another smell issue I suppose).
I bought a rather expensive packet of Not Tonight, Deer, which is supposedly safe on plants and
works wonders in keeping away the deer. You should visit the site for a
good giggle ? they have other punny products like Mole-otov Cocktail to
keep away moles and gophers, and Armadillo Armageddon to scare off
armadillo from eating your crops. I’ll keep you posted on whether or not
the deer repellent works. In fact, I plan on writing an article for the
site about all the anti-deer methods I’ve tried that work and don’t
work.
See some recent plant photos.
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