Can I pre-order plants?
Very occasionally, we may offer plants on a pre-order basis. This will only be when we have a strong batch of plants growing on, which we can be sure will be ready within 3-4 weeks. This is usually only during the fast growing season of spring and early summer.
We do not routinely offer the option to pre-order out-of-stock plants. This is because most of the plants we offer are grown by us, and are not just bought in from a wholesaler grower when we run out.
We keep ‘stock plants’, from which we propagate to create new plants. How we do this depends on the plant, as the same methods do not work for all plants. We usually either collect seed, take stem or root cuttings, or divide. For all of these methods, the plants have to be strong and healthy and we can usually only do some of these methods at certain times of the year. For example, stem cuttings can be taken (usually) from March to November, but seeds are often only available for a short time after flowering once per year and division of some plants only in spring, and others only in autumn.
Plants are living things and, as you will know from your own gardening experience, they can be affected by pests and disease and grow at different rates and can be randomly unreliable. This has a material bearing on availability.
An example of why we don’t allow routine pre-ordering:
A customer orders 10 plants in January. Three of these plants (A) are available at the time of ordering, the rest are pre-ordered. Two plants become available in March, three in April and two (B) in June.
Either we send each plant as it becomes available, which means that we have to pay for four deliveries (which, at the time of writing, would be a total direct cost of £30 for this number of plants, not including our time), or we wait six months to send all of the plants. The customer will usually not want to wait six months for their order (especially if plants B become available in mid-winter) and also, we either have to care for plants A for six months (repotting etc, as they grow bigger), or not reserve them and risk them not being available when plants B are ready.
Although not a perfect solution, we do offer the option for customers to be alerted by email when plants become available. This is an automatic process, which involves the customer entering their email into the box on the relevant out-of-stock plant page on the website.
For information, we tend to have the greatest number of plants available in mid-late summer.
