Wilson Bros Gardens Review

Wilson Bros Gardens, also referred to as Wilson Bros Nursery first went online in 2015 at wilsonbrosgardens.com but that doesn’t tell the whole story.  The Wilson brothers have been selling online since 2004.

Brooks and Brent Wilson have a long & prosperous entrepreneurial history. You can get ALL the details on their website here.

WilsonBrosGardens.com website went through an upgrade early in 2019.  We actually placed an order in March 2019 for a Berkman’s Golden Arborvitae shrub. We posted pictures and a detailed review of the experience on our blog. You can view the pics & read the review; “Unboxing Berkman’s Golden Arborvitae”.

Shopping on WilsonBrosGardens.com was a good experience and seems to have been updated a bit the past few months to make it even more intuitive for the user experience.  There’s a lot of plant information on the product pages.  There’s also a ton of knowledge and advice on their blog.

Overall, we were very pleased with the shopping experience & quality of product received.

Wilson Bros Gardens Google Reviews

There are only 58 Wilson Bros Google reviews, the most recent are quite a mix of ratings & reviews all over the place.  The average is a 3.6 rating, not great but not too bad.  Just odd that there are so few reviews. And there seems to be a mix of reviews for both the garden center, the online nursery and the landscape company.

On their website, wilsonbrosgardens.com, we noticed a fair amount of actual product reviews. Looking at a few of the WilsonBrosGardens.com top 20 selling plants and There’s also tabs on the page with a lot of other useful information. Customer questions with answers from the staff. Planting & care guides, and more.

Pricing is Attractive… so is FREE Shipping

Wilson Bros Gardens seems to have a pretty wide variety of container sizes for sale. Mostly 1, 2 & 3 gallon container sizes but we also some smaller 2.5 quart container sizes listed.

Wilson Bros Gardens also offers free shipping on all orders. No minimum order, no coupon codes.

Just as a comparison, a 2 gallon container Wintergreen Boxwood on WislonBrosGardens.com is $34.92. That includes shipping. Nature Hills, one of their biggest competitors, had a 1 quart container Wintergreen Boxwood for sale at $37.95 PLUS you would be charged $17.95 shipping. $55.90 for a 1 quart or $34.92 for a 2 gallon container?  Not a difficult choice.

Wilson Bros Gardens Guarantee & Return Policy

There’s a lot said on their Guarantee & Return Policy page but it really boils down to a couple of things.

Let Wilson Brothers know within 48 hours of delivery if there’s an obvious issue.  Send a bunch of pictures.  If they agree, you can get a replacement or refund.

“If for any reason you wish to return a plant(s), we allow you 30 days after delivery to do so.” But… you need to contact customer service to get authorization for initiating a return.  And there’s some other red tape. It’s not as bad as we have seen with other online nurseries. Just take a lot of pictures of everything upon receipt. The shipping box, packing materials, plants, close up of the plants. You may need all of them to get a replacement or refund. One positive, they will supply a return shipping label if they do authorize a return. That is very unique for online nurseries.

Wilson Bros Gardens Terms of Conditions that you agree to when you buy from them online is one of the shortest we have seen. Nothing scary or out of the ordinary that we could notice.

Wilson Bros Gardens Shipping Times

Wilson Bros gardens have a page dedicated to their shipping and processing times.  It states most orders are shipped in 2 to 5 business days.  Every product page we looked at stated 2 to 7 business days.

Wilson Bros… going out of business???

There were 3 businesses the brothers have owned & operated at the same location. The online nursery, a local retail garden center and Wilson Bros Landscape.  We use past tense (were) because they announced the closing of the garden center as of November, 2018. It caused enough of a commotion that ‘Wilson Bros going out of business’ is still one of the top auto-fill recommendations when Google searching Wilson Bros.  That’s not good.

Wilson Bros Gardens posted a page dedicated to answering the growing concerns; “Why Was The Garden Center In McDonough Closed?”.  There are still a few areas of confusion for us.  The page says; “…closing of the nursery and garden center…”  But their landscape company, listed at the same location, states on their website; “With our five acre nursery facility, Wilson Bros. Landscape, in conjunction with Wilson Bros. Nursery, has the capability to store plant material ensuring timely installation and completion of any size project. Our clients can visit the nursery at any time to create a preference list…”.

We spoke with Brent Wilson and traded a few emails back in April, 2019. Super nice guy who seems very enthusiastic, motivated & focused on sending quality plant material.  He mentioned they were working with several local growers for contract growing and fulfillment.

Shortly after that we noticed a lot of their products seemed to be out of stock.  We assumed that their reliance on other growers limited what they had available to sell.

When we looked again a few weeks ago, WilsonBrosGardens.com had a lot more products in stock. Something changed.  We have sent Brent a few emails hoping to ask a couple of questions:

• Do you still have the 5 acre ‘nursery’?
• Are all plants ordered shipped from one location?
• If no, are any plants shipped from outside your immediate area

We never got a reply. So, we’re not sure if they’re using a drop ship model and sending orders to be fulfilled at other nurseries, locally, nationally, a combination of both, or none of the above.

We will update this if we hear anything from them.

We have also seen a few articles online about the website getting sued in Federal court over alleged copyright violations for using plant photo's without permission.  It appears that a judgment was ordered against them for about $17,944 in damages. We're not attorney's, we never played one on TV, so here's a link if you want to review the legal notes: https://www.pacermonitor.com/public/case/27332372/Garden_World_Images_Ltd_v_WilsonBrosGardenscom_LLC

Our opinion, the Wilson Bros care about sending quality plant material. They seem to charge reasonable prices, offer a wide variety of plants and they have built a very informative online nursery website.

What were the red flags?

The lawsuit sounds scary but after working 10 years with online nurseries I have seen this kind of thing happen before. One rogue graphic artist could put a picture up on your website that you had no idea was copyrighted.

We really couldn't come up with anything that concerned us enough to deduct any points!