High Country Gardens is a plant nursery based in New Mexico and Utah. They specialize in native and drought resistant plants.
They also feature plants that attract hummingbirds and bees, which is what brought me to their online ordering site. I hope we can attract hummingbirds to our little urban balcony container garden.
The High Country Gardens website is easy to use. A unique feature is their preplanned gardens section, where they have 40+ different plant collections. For example, there are collections for “Container Garden for Full Sun”, “Native Northeast Songbird Garden”, “Serene Shade Pre-Planned Garden”, etc. Even if you don’t want a full preplanned garden, browsing the collections can give you ideas for your planting spot.
They have some great policies too, like being free of neonicotinoid pesticides (which harm pollinators) and providing a 100% guarantee on plants for up to a year after purchasing.
We placed an order in late March and chose a delivery date in April. High Country Garden’s busiest time is in spring, and it did indeed take a couple of days to get an email response to a question.
The plants were shipped from High Country Gardens on a Tuesday via UPS and and arrived to our home a week later, the following Tuesday.
Opening the box, our perennial plants were packed in sideways, with plastic covers over their tops. A few leaves were broken off and some soil had come out, but overall the plants were in good condition.
All our plants came in plastic pots that were 4” x 4” at the top and 5” deep. The didn’t have a ton of foliage at the top, but all had excellent root development, which is most important.
We got Salvia and Agastache (Hummingbird Mint) and Lavender perennials. They will go into EarthBox and City Picker self-watering planter boxes on our urban balcony garden.
Overall, we were happy with this order of plants from High Country Gardens and would use their website to order from them online in the future.
