Gardening provides an enjoyable outlet for creativity and imagination. It’s also good exercise—and often hard work. Gardeners dream of each new season, and they delight in seeing their gardens take shape over the years. There’s always work to do, and there are always spaces to fill with new plants. But a gorgeous landscape or a colorful display of textures and shapes makes the work worthwhile.
Selecting the right plants can be challenging. Gardeners need to consider their agricultural zones, soil conditions, sunlight, rainfall, space constraints, and a host of other factors when selecting plants. The best places to buy outdoor plants online offer astoundingly large inventories of plants, along with informative recommendations to make the most appropriate plant choices.
Take advantage of this modern-day avenue for selecting and purchasing live plants. With innovative shipping methods and customer satisfaction guarantees, online nurseries ensure successful results for thriving plants.
1. The Home Depot
Dark Purple Reblooming Lilac Shrub—$27.04
Step inside the garden center at The Home Depot and you’ll find perennials, annuals, grasses, fruits and vegetables, bushes and trees, ground cover, and more. If you can’t get there in-person—or if you prefer the convenience of shopping online—the retailer has plenty of plants and seeds available for online ordering and delivery.
The Home Depot lets you filter your search by specific features that are important to your yard, whether you’re looking for plants that are low maintenance, dog- and cat-safe, or butterfly-attracting. While you’re shopping for outdoor plants and/or seeds, you can also snag everything else you’ll need for your garden, from soil to fertilizer to gardening tools. It’s a one-stop shop.
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2. Lowe’s
Multi-color Pansy (8-Pack)—$3.88
Lowe’s makes shopping for outdoor plants online easy. You can browse thousands of plants, bulbs, and seeds, whether you’re looking for dogwood trees, rose bushes, or marigolds. To help you find what you’re looking for, the plants are broken up into detailed categories, like drought-tolerant, safer for pets, light and water requirements, zones, and even growth rate.
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3. Tractor Supply
Green Giant Arborvitae—$19.99
Tractor Supply is a haven of all things lawn and garden—including a bevy of outdoor plants. You can browse flowers, ground cover plants, edible plants, trees, bushes, vines, and climbing plants. The retailer also carries tons of seeds, whether you’re looking to plant fruits and vegetables or annuals and perennials.
You can sort your results by features like drought-tolerant or disease-resistant along with sun tolerance or bloom color. Tractor Supply also has a whole line of organic plants, if that’s important to you. You can have your plants delivered to your home—there’s even a same-day delivery option for eligible products—or opt for curbside pickup at your nearest Tractor Supply location.
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4. Burpee
Baby Cherry Tomatoes—$24.95
Burpee began selling seeds from a mail-order catalog in 1881. Now the largest seed company in the world, it has grown to include live plants, bare roots, and bulbs alongside its massive seed selection.
Burpee offers annual and perennial flowering plants, herbs, vegetables, and fruit-bearing shrubs and trees. It also features heirloom varieties of flowers and vegetables, as well as vegetable seeds and plants that are certified organic. To say its inventory is extensive would be an understatement. On Burpee’s website, gardeners can access instructional how-to videos, as well as informative articles on a plethora of gardening topics, problems, and solutions.
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5. Bluestone Perennials
Hydrangea Wee White—$24.95
Bluestone Perennials is a family-owned business based in Madison, Ohio that’s best known for flowering perennials and flowering shrubs. Additionally, it features a large selection of chrysanthemums as well as ornamental grasses and flowering groundcovers. Its inventory exceeds 1,000 plant varieties.
The growers at Bluestone Perennials sow their plants in 100 percent biodegradable pots made from coconut husk fibers. Customers receive their plants in these breathable pots and plant them directly in the ground—pot and all. Over time, the pots become part of the soil, eliminating the need to disturb the plants by transplanting them. Plants develop robust root systems in the plantable and breathable pots, allowing them to get off to a healthy start in their new garden homes.
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6. Brighter Blooms
Meyer Lemon Tree—$59.99
It might seem odd to purchase a living tree from an online source, but Brighter Blooms offers a vast selection of fruit trees, flowering trees, evergreen trees, and shade trees in an enormous array of tree varieties. Customers can select shipment of trees from between 2 to 3 feet tall and 6 to 7 feet in height.
You’ll also find a wealth of information, ideas, and suggestions for gardeners on Brighter Blooms’ website. Based on climate, soil, and space considerations, the growers guide customers to select plants that will thrive in their environments. With detailed instructions for planting, pruning, watering, and caring for plants, Brighter Blooms provides the necessary information for even beginning gardeners to achieve success.
The company ships from its nursery in Fort Mill, South Carolina, and is not open to the public. Each plant is shipped to the customer with a 30-Day Happy and Healthy Guarantee.
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7. Etsy
Lemongrass Plants (2-Pack)—$19.97
Esty is a marketplace for creative vendors who produce unique, handcrafted items for global sales and distribution. The creativity that goes into plant cultivation and propagation is not overlooked on Etsy—there is an abundance of live plants available on the site.
You can search Etsy for live plants by name or by type. Sellers offer a broad array of annual and perennial flowering plants and shrubs in addition to vegetable bedding plants. Gardeners may purchase flowering and fruit trees as cuttings, bare roots, or seedlings. Numerous varieties of ornamental grasses and vines round out the plethora of live outdoor plant options on Etsy.
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8. Great Garden Plants
Black Scallop Bugleweed—$14.99
Great Garden Plants offers perennial shrubs, flowering plants, and evergreen trees, as well as climbing vines for color and foliage. Throughout the website, the growers offer advice for plant selection based on specific needs, such as container plantings, rain gardens, privacy screening, landscape fillers, and a wealth of other gardening objectives.
To ensure that plants thrive, Great Garden Plants recommends gardeners shop for plants according to the agricultural zones in which they live. The website is replete with information and recommendations regarding an array of gardening goals and problems. These include small-space considerations, deer resistance, maximizing color, sloping terrains, heat or cold tolerance, wet or dry soils, and more. You’ll get a no-risk, 30-day customer satisfaction guarantee for your plants, which are shipped in amply sized containers.
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9. Heirloom Roses
Golden Celebration Roses—$60
Growers at Heirloom Roses, which is located in the Willamette Valley region of Oregon, do not engage in the common practices of grafting or budding to create new plants. Instead, they employ a process known as “own root.” Each plant shipped out to customers is a first-year cutting on its own roots, grown from a leaf cutting derived from a mother plant. They are small when they arrive, but gardeners find that these plants quickly catch up to grafted roses.
Although a plethora of rose varieties form the basis of Heirloom Roses’ business, the company also offers an array of complementary shrubs. These include flowering perennials like crape myrtle, blueberry bushes, hibiscus, and wisteria. Heirloom Roses does not sell vegetables, trees, grasses, and other types of plants.
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10. Nature Hills
Tiny Monster Geranium—$39.49
Claiming to be “America’s Largest Online Plant Nursery,” Nature Hills offers an astounding array of live plants of numerous types and varieties for diverse gardening purposes. The nursery offers shade trees, evergreen trees, and fruit and flowering trees, as well as a large assortment of bushes and shrubs. On a smaller scale, it features numerous varieties of flowering plants—both perennials and annuals. Gardeners may also shop for an array of ornamental grasses, ground covers, and bulbs.
The website is well organized to make plant selection easy. Plants are categorized for multiple features, including flower color, zone hardiness, sun exposure, growth rate, blooming period, height and spread, and more.
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11. Spring Hill Nurseries
For The Birds Shrub Collection—$67.99
One of the oldest mail-order garden centers in the U.S., Spring Hill Nurseries has been shipping high-quality plants to gardeners for 172 years. Featuring a large inventory of plant types and varieties, Spring Hill Nurseries offers ornamental trees, flowering vines, shrubs, perennial and annual flowering plants, rose bushes and climbing roses, and bulbs. Its curated collections feature plants that work well together to complement or create multiple types of gardens. It does not sell plants for vegetable gardens.
Innovation and improvement remain high priorities for the researchers and horticulturists at Spring Hill Nurseries, who work continuously to ensure their plants perform well in gardens all across the U.S. To this end, the Spring Hill team members collaborate with plant breeders and testing agencies as well as botanical gardens and universities.
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12. Cactus Limon
Mammillaria Fraileana Cactus Plant—$10.25
Cactus Limon is a small, family-owned business founded 15 years ago and based in California. The owners have been growing cactus and succulent plants as a hobby since childhood. On its website, they offer plant care tips regarding the appropriate light, water, soil, fertilizer, and other conditions for gardeners to enjoy success in growing the plants.
