WOW!! I have ordered from HCG in the past and have had no problems at all with them. I am sure they will reimburse you with new plants or refund your money. Take photos of the plants so you can show them. The plants are always *tiny* but whatever...good luck!

Beca

Hey Beca,

I know! Almost everyone has had great experiences with them. I can't believe it. They did offer a refund today - really fast! But it wasn't for the right amount. I'll see what happens.

I *was* expecting small, but geez. Hopefully the ones that look somewhat decent will do well, as some have written about here.

How did yours do? Did they thrive? Did they just do "ehhh"?

Oh - The person who wrote me back said she'd forward my letter to the growers and shippers. I hope it makes a difference! Maybe they are just going through a bad time there right now.

Anyhow, thanks for writing :)

It sounds like your order was shipped directly from the growers. It is good that you made a complaint and requested a refund. Pictures, taken right away, are definitely in order to prove your point. HCG needs to understand that you received shoddy merchandise from those growers, and discontinue doing their business with them!

I have mail ordered from HCG. My plants arrived in good condition. There were no insects or snails. The plants were smaller than I had anticipated. However, not a single plant perished. It is now three years later, they are all large and thriving.

I've been to the HGC shop in Santa Fe, as well as the shop in Albuquerque. The shops are nicely kept, the plants and trees are beautiful, and the sales people are terrific--helpful and well informed.

Your disaster does not surprise me in the least. I have also been to HCG retail store, which is very nice, everything well kept and beautiful (plants are usually good-sized and healthy), but it is simply overpriced. The value for the money, which seems to be your biggest gripe, is just lacking. I don't know, but I'm sure this is even more the case for mail order stuff. I usually wait for special sales, or just use it as a high-priced comparison when shopping around.

I can see why HCG is so well known... the availability of rarely seen native plants from a catalog... but if I were in Tucson I would definitely find alternatives. Plants are much cheaper there, and much much cheaper farther west in California. In NM I really like Plants of the Southwest. They're overpriced as well, but they really have the native thing down, and you can expect their stuff to be hardened off, as it's often grown right outside.

Anyway, good luck on getting your full refund and finding what you want.

I hadn't followed up on this, and wanted to say that I did get my refund for the plants. Though, when considering *half* of the plants were screwy, I thought they should pay half of the shipping charges - but they didn't.

On top of that, of the plants that remained - not all of the survived. Now that it's spring, I can be sure. My garden is pretty bare looking compared to what I'd expected when ordering :/

If the plants were anywhere near as fantastic as I'd read, I'd have been happy to pay the price. Alas....

-

Luckily, I've learned a lot more about Xeriscape and native plants and came up with a plan:

Learn from sites and people online, catalogs like HCG, cut out or print out photos and info on water, sun, height, width, and bloom times - Put them in a 'diary'. (My diary is a simple black and white "Composition" book from the supermarket.) Then bring that with me to local nurseries and even cheapo big stores.

This has worked out great!

I found some sweet Gazanias for 1/2 the price of HCG and they are 4 times the size. They are doing better than any of my HCG plants.

It's so handy to take this diary everywhere - It helps me to *focus* and keeps me from getting a mass of plants that won't work in my garden (which I have done *many* times - who can resist pretty flowers?!)

Many of you have probably done something like this already, but I'm a bit slow when it comes to desert gardening and wish someone had told me to do it when we first moved here!

If you live in Tucson and see a woman with a B&W Compo book reading furiously at the nursery, come up and say hello :)

-A

Received my shipment from HCG today...even living right here in Albuquerque there are some plants only available thru the catalog that I simply had to have :-) All plants arrived in excellent condition, good size, well rooted and healthy. This is typical of my experiences over several years of ordering from them, so I want to say I think the bad batch you got is an exception and not the rule...I've lost several plants I gotten from them over the years but the vast majority have performed well for me and were worth the extra dollars especially since those plants were not available anywhere else.