Best Way to Plant Container-Grown Plants from Local Nurseries

In the Northeast, you can go to a local nursery by the end of April, beginning of May, and look for the perennials you want. Take your list, by all means, but keep an open mind in case you come across something else worthwhile. Go for tough, bushy, well-shaped plants. Never mind that they’re not in flower—they shouldn’t be at this time of year.

A local nurseryman decided to meet the demand for delphiniums; he seeded some in winter and put the individually potted plants on sale in May. They were handsome, bushy plants five or six inches tall, but they didn’t sell. He realized why when a customer who asked for them took one look and said, “Oh, no. Delphiniums are five or six feet tall, with enormous blue spikes.” Did she really think a six-foot, flower-topped giant would be growing in a little plastic pot? My heartfelt advice—be an informed gardener. Learn to recognize plants from their foliage and buy them when they’re small.

When you get home from the nursery you can plant right away or leave them in their pots a day or two to acclimatize them to your garden. This is important to me because my garden is on an exposed hillside at an elevation of eighteen hundred feet, whereas the nurseries that grew the plants are in a sheltered valley.

Compost at hand, you’re ready to plant. Dig the hole and put the obligatory shovelful of compost in the bottom. Tip the plant out of its pot. Never pull the plant by its stem. You may have to knead the pot to loosen the plant. You can do this with your hands, or feet in the case of a large plant.

Most likely the plant will have been in that pot over winter and will fall out in a solid pot-shaped ball. Break up this ball, shorten extra-long roots, and be sure that no one root is girdling the others. Loosen the soil at the bottom of the root mass, and plant as described for bare-root plants.

Don’t be afraid to treat the plant in this way. A healthy plant will soon grow more roots, and thrive. A new gardener’s inclination is to plant the whole root mass undisturbed, but this can result in the weakening and eventual death of the plant as it is strangled by its own roots.

Occasionally, when you tip the pot upside down, instead of a pot-shaped ball of roots a whole potful of loose planting mix may fall out, revealing a scarcely rooted and pitifully small plant. This is because it has been sold too soon, so recently potted that it has not had time to root itself. (This often happens with plants that are the “in” thing that season, and the rush was not anticipated.) The only thing you can do is repot the plant, give it time to root and establish itself, then put it out in the ground and hope for the best.