Ask the nurseries. Some may not use those poisons but the source of their plants may, however, they should be aware of that.

What about buying seeds ? They're easy to find and a lot cheaper. And you can grow them organically.

Yes, seeds is the way to go. In this case I have an event coming up and I'm pressed for time. But maybe I'll have to skip the new planting. A local Armstrong nursery told me neonictinoids are banned in Calif. but this is not true. Home Depot has lots of plants grown with them.

I would assume that HD buy their plants around the whole country or neighboring countries from the cheapest suppliers so I personally wouldn't trust them much.

If you can afford it perhaps you could buy some grown flowers from Whole Food. Not all, but some WF have flowers displayed usually near the entrance.

I don't know your area, but in San Francisco I also noticed quite a lot of quaint little shops selling plants for grainolas and I would assume these would be grown organically too.

I can understand it would be nice for your event to have flowers growing around your place. Last year I had an event at the very beginning of june and I grew a lot of Stupice early tomatoes just to impress the guests ;-) Then it sucked to have that many little toms instead of the big good beefsteak ones but I had to choose between impressing guests or enjoying good toms ;-)

Francoise, I wouldn't make that assumption.

home depot here in reno now has a separate succulent display which is labeled as being treated with neonictinoids.

Rhizo you're right, I'm just such a gullible sucker, I've just received a bag of starting medium for seeds that I ordered from a weeds site and it was guaranteed organic, I paid $ 30 for it and it's a small one, and full of chemical NPK ! Not to mention that it came in a box with sexy women drawn on it, and delivered at my work place, and every one even the delivering guy made jokes :-( What is the correlation between weeds, starting medium, and sexy women I still wonder !