Albert's Greenhouse

It's winter. It's cold outside. Time to sit by the fire, and see what the mailman brought us this year... This is part of a series of short looks at some of the plant catalogs that arrived in January.

Catalog: Forest Farm
Cover Plant: Miscellaneous line drawings
Paper: Newsprint, 556pgs.
Pictures: None to speak of. There are some line drawings and appropriate quotations.

Selling Ice to Eskimos: Vinca minor $5.95 - for every one person who wants to plant this groundcover, there's another just trying to get rid of it ... unsuccessfully.

Cost of the Black Colocasia: Not Offered. They sell Podophyllum "kaleidoscope" for $29.00. Not a bad price at all for what it is.
Cost of the Beefsteak Tomato: Not Offered. They do have fruit trees, though, and cranberry.
Best Bet: Osmanthus fragrans in a tube for $9.95. This "sweet olive" is a shrub which flowers at an early age, and the flowers smell quite strongly of apricot. Some evenings you can walk around my neighborhood and smell the trees in back yards from the street. When we were in China, we saw people in the parks gathering the fallen blossoms to flavor and scent tea.

Forest Farm's catalog, I must say, is probably better viewed online if you're looking for a specific plant. It's over 500 pages of short descriptions of available plants, and it's tough going in spite of the occasional gardening quote or line drawing. If, on the other hand, you are missing that rare variety of osmanthus, or want to collect every known species of pine, this might just be your nursery.

I live a couple hundred miles from Forest Farm on the west coast, and am therefore in ideal shipping territory. The shrubs and perennials I have ordered from them have been without fail well packed, quickly shipped, and excellently grown. It's really a classy operation, and the prices for tubes are a bargain for the quality and rarity of what they offer.