Wow, that salvia sounds really nice! What does it look like?

LOL, I feel your pain, but I run across sales clerks like that even at real garden centres. Last year I was looking for the tall snapdragons, Rocket variety. The girl pointed to floral carpet and said,

"They get really tall."

I showed her the tag, and told her that Floral Carpet was the dwarf variety with which I was already very familar. I showed her where it said, 6 to 8 inches.

"No, those get like, 3 feet high."

Sigh.

"No, they don't. I get them every year."

"Well, we were told that those are tall."

"But they say Floral Carpet!"

She shrugged and kept chewing gum.

So I was kind of sarcastic -

"Are you saying they've all got the wrong tags?"

"YES."

Sometimes it's just not worth the energy. You know when you've been to 4 or 5 garden centres and you're hot and sweaty and hubby thought you were going to be back home 2 hours ago? LOL. But yes, it still irks me a bit!

Would love to see a pic of that salvia when it's in its glory.... :)

Pam

I never ask a big box store employee a question because they rarely know what they are talking about. Especially any chewing gum :)

Don't you love when you're looking for something on the shelf where it should be and there are none there, so you go ask someone if they have any more, and they go right to the shelf you were looking at and see nothing there and say, "Nope none here!"

I know your frustration, but it takes years to learn all about plants, and these are people making minimum wage who may work there 3 months and move on to sell TV's, and they won't know anything about them either.
These "big box" stores usually have a garden center manager who has some knowledge of plants. If you ask for him/her, you might get decent advice. Make it clear that if they aren't sure, just to say so. You can always go home, do your research on the web, and if the plant is what you want, go back and buy it.

The other option is for the stores to provide proper tagging. The growers are going to more generic labels to the point where the labels are useless. All perennial labels should be marked with the zone hardiness and these situations would be solved even if the employee were clueless. I saw one local box store selling gardenias and jasmines and yes, mandevilla as "Perennials" tucked in with the hardy stock. Oh yeah, they're perennial in Hawaii.

Calliope, I agree that the labels many growers are now using are useless. Some don't even have basic information on size of the plant! And the ones on the salvia and centradenia did not, of course, list hardiness info--that would've helped.

Unfortunately, Eldo, the manager was one of the people I asked about these!

Pam, the salvia is very pretty. I will post a photo here later this week (though it's not flowering at the moment, the foliage is lovely).

smilie said, "I never ask a big box store employee a question because they rarely know what they are talking about. Especially any chewing gum :)"

This is sorta off-topic, but it reminds me of a trip I made to Home Depot last week. I was in the garden center checkout line with the latest roll of green vinyl-coated chicken wire to protect my baby perennials from the rabbits.

When I got to the register, the clerk asked me if that's what goes over strawberries to keep the birds out! I answered, "no, it's what goes around flowers to keep the rabbits out. You're probably thinking of the plastic netting." But gee, he thought that hardware cloth was what you used to fence out rabbits, and he'd just suggested the chicken wire to a woman growing her first strawberry plants. Oy.

Luckily for him, there was no one waiting to check out behind me, so I could take him back to the shelves to explain floating row cover, bird netting, and various fencing options. Meanwhile, I feel for that poor woman wrestling with 25' of chicken wire, trying to figure out how to drape it over her berry plants!