Breaking: Something Good to Say about Home Depot
March 21st, 2007 
by Susan Harris
So I was listening to the Q&A following the showing of a movie about American elms, part of DC’s
Environmental Film Festival. A panel of professional treehuggers was answering questions from the crowd, a couple of hundred more treehuggers. Having been impressed by the film’s high praise for the disease-resistant Princeton elm and eager to buy one, an audience member asks: Where can a homeowner buy one? Hearing another audience member yell out "Home Depot", the questioner continues, "No, seriously. I really want to buy one."
So here’s where it gets weird. The person blurting out "Home Depot" represents
River Edge Farm in Georgia, which happens to be a major grower of American elms, and he further declared that he’s recently delivered 12,000 of the prized, hard-to-get Princeton elms to Home Depots along the East Coast. "And they’re really promoting them," he tells us, by featuring them prominently in the stores. Another audience member pipes up to say "Buy ‘em quick before they kill ‘em," which elicited a knowing laugh from the crowd.
So why DOES Home Depot kill its plants by giving them no care at all? Like not watering them, even after they’ve placed them in the blazing sun. Well, the blogging nurseryman at The Golden Gecko in California explains that it’s because Home Depot and other mass merchant stores like Lowes only pay for the plants when they’re sold, so they have no financial incentive to keep them alive. When they kill ‘em by neglect, it’s the grower who suffers. So growers are banding together to hire their own plant care staff to drive around to the plant-killing big boxes and water their plants. Amazing what terms you can negotiate when you have all the power.
Oops. Looks like I’ve returned to the more familiar subject matter for me or anyone who’s ever shopped there - griping about Home Depot. We’ve all been there, right? But just this once, head on over to your nearest plant-killing hardware store and pick up a Princeton elm - quick.
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March 21st, 2007 at 11:14 am
Wow, so the tree farms are shipping out trees they know they won’t get paid for? What a hard way for them to make a buck. I guess the big box stores like Home Depot and Lowes can force them to do that considering the potential volume, but still. I have never bought a tree from them, so have no experience, good or bad. The only thing I buy from Home Depot are the bedding plants in the large flats when I need pansies or some other annuals to fill in for the spring. It would be a huge pain, financially and work wise to plant a tree from them that you don’t know will survive because it was neglected by the store. How hard can it be to have someone run a hose to them once in a while. Contrarily, we have only lost one tree we’ve bought from a tree nursery, and that was a young red maple that couldn’t handle our erratic winter/spring weather. As long as we do a little research on trees that will survive our arid climate with unpredictable spring weather, and proper site placement, we’re fine.
March 21st, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Reminds me a little of the huge planting/landscaping/building project happening on South Dakota Ave. just after you pass Bladensburg Rd. to get on Rte. 50. Have you noticed? It’s a huge townhouse development with home “from the low $500,000s” where they uproote a huge number of mature trees and built what must be the world’s longest retaining wall (say walls). The recently stuck huge numbers of trees on the retaining wall terraces, including many conifer types that appear to be DOA. I think we need to take pic’s and ask the developer just what, exactly, he had in mind putting all these poor juvenile trees in the ground only to be not watered and die almost immediately….
March 21st, 2007 at 6:49 pm
Timely blog as I stopped in at the local HD yesterday for some market research. Since it is still too early to plant in this area, frozen ground and snow still, there was little there except a few Bradford pears, apple trees and some cherry trees all still dormant so not yet dead. I was really surprised at the prices, $19.95 for a 7′-8′ container tree. I will be watching for those elms! I was actually looking for some large containers and they hadn’t yet arrived but those left over from last year were overpriced and chipped and not even worth the 50% discount. I think it interesting that they actually have customers pay them to haul off their garbage!
March 22nd, 2007 at 12:27 pm
Last fall I was very surprised to see that HD had set up a sprinkler and was watering all the trees, shrubs and perennials. In fact, every time I visited the store (different days of the week, for several weeks), they were either watering or had obviously just watered.
I had been eyeing a couple of shrubs that I was specifically looking for, but didn’t buy any at first becaus I figured they had been abused. After seeing how well they were cared for, I figured I might as well buy from them as opposed to mail order - at least I could inspect them and pick out the best ones.
Of course, that is one HD - I don’t even know if any of the other stores in the state took care of their plants, but at least some do.
March 23rd, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I have a Home Depot and a Lowes right next door to each other near me (literally next door, they are in the same strip mall development thing, and there are no other stores between them!)
The Home Depot has miserable, crummy plants, but the Lowes seems to have gotten lucky with hiring some great garden center staff. Like Bogie’s HD, I’ve never been in there and not seen something either being watered or having just been watered.
March 24th, 2007 at 1:00 am
I only buy plants from Home Depot when they are fresh of the truck.
March 26th, 2007 at 8:30 am
I am one of those folks who stops in Home Depot every Saturday morning at 8:00 a.m. to pick up what ever plants I actually want before they die of neglect. I will conceed they are generally neglected. But I feel so sorry for the little buggers, I consider it a rescue mission. And sometimes, I even pick up the desperately neglected ones at a HUGE discount. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I’ve every actually lost a Home Depot plant. For instance, I bought five Knock Out Roses for 25 cents a piece, two years ago, that were pretty dried out and barely rooted. I kept them in a mostly sunny spot for a couple of years, while they grew strong. And I just moved them to a very sunny spot along the stairs that lead to my front door, where they seem to be thriving. I bought an Althea standard years ago, for a dollar, that was in such bad shape that it was nothing more than a stick with a three pronged stick root system. After a few years in a large clay pot, and lots of TLC, that Althea was transplanted to a nice spot by my garage where she became a large flowering traffic-stopping beauty. The really lovely Red Bud and Red Maple that have grown tall and strong in my front side garden were purchased for less than $10 each one sunny Saturday in October. I admit that my best plants (like my Serviceberry) were purchased at the local nursery. But I love my Home Depot orphans, too.
March 27th, 2007 at 12:23 am
I like to pick up the bulb and rhizome plants when they are tossing ‘em after they’re done blooming…