Great Garden Plants Nursery Review

Great Garden Plants rating came with an 87; putting their grade at a B+.  Great Garden Plants is our #1 ranked online nursery for the fourth month in a row.

The woman who owned Great Garden Plants and her husband, have good reputations within the industry.  Having worked in the online plant nursery business for 10 years, you see a little bit of everything.  I’ve never met them, but they seem to genuinely care.

They both retired and sold their business in January, 2019 to Spring Meadow Nursery. Spring Meadow is also family operated and they also have a very good reputation within the industry. Spring Meadow is a grower/propagator. They do not sell retail.

GreatGardenPlants.com seems to have a larger focus on perennials and ground covers but they do have a decent selection of evergreen shrubs.  Evergreen trees & shrubs are listed together.  There have been some updates to the site over the past few months. It is obvious from the changes that the owners are really good plant people, maybe not the best at retail e-commerce.  That's not necessarily a bad thing!

Great Garden Plants is located in Michigan.  Even though growing season is in full bloom in the southern United States, you should probably contact them regarding ship times since they are a northern nursery. That, and with the tighter restrictions Michigan has in place for their COVID-19 response, you would be best served to call them in advance of giving them your money.

The sizes available online at Great Garden Plants range from 3” pots to 1 gallon sizes.  Good range of sizes, just smaller then you can find on other sites.  And it's not very easy to find what the sizes are that are being sold. It's just not very intuitive. Their prices, however, are great!

Great Garden Plants launched a new & improved website just over 2 years ago.  It is a lot cleaner looking.  For me, it’s a bit obvious they are plant geeks, not marketing geeks.  As a marketing nerd myself, I notice a number of small things that could be tweaked to make the site a better experience for the user and probably increase their sales.

Despite their #1 ranking, we're becoming a little concerned about a few things. We reached out them a few times via email the past few months but never heard back. There's also an increase in negative Google reviews. There's not a lot, 10 reviews total but just a 3.3 average rating is a little worrisome. You can view them here.

Their guarantee is similar to Garden Crossings. In other words, it is pretty good.  They have a ‘No Risk 30 Day Guarantee’ that actually offers a refund, not a store credit.  There is one thing in the fine print; “A plant refund is based on the plant cost less discounts and shipping charges.”

They also brag about their plants having larger root systems.  “We ship jumbo size plants with hefty root systems that outperform smaller plants obtained from other mail order nurseries.”

Overall, quality people running a good site.

What were the red flags? 

We deducted 1 point because there is an alert listed on their Better Business Profile that Great Garden Plants is out of business. You can view it here.

ALERTS FOR THIS BUSINESS

Out of Business: According to information in BBB files, this company is no longer in business. It seems that this is a logistic slip up but needs to be rectified. It's been 5 months now since the BBB first reported this.