Star Nursery on Boulder is awesome! If you'll indulge me for a hefty read, I'll qualify my rating, and possibly offer some counterpoints to the negative reviews on here.
My family ran an orange orchard in Valencia, Spain. I practically grew up in a nursery. While at university ( Arizona State), I was an easy hire as the garden specialist at Home Depot in Mesa, AZ. What I can tell you with all certainty, is that Home Depot, Lowe's, Walmart, Costco, and Target stores in SoCal, Nevada, and Arizona - get nearly all their plants directly from greenhouses in SoCal. The nurseries don't even bother to acclimatize the plants, because they know the plants will die, either in the store or at the customer's house. At my Home Depot, the nursery reps would come in every week and swap out probably 40% of the plants which didn't last a week in Phoenix heat. In the worst part of summer, some reps had to come twice a week and swap out the plants. The reality is, stores offer customers a "1 year plant refund guarantee" - not because they have faith in the plants they sell, but to get customers back in the store spending more money. That business model, is how on one brutal summer day, a nursery truck dumped around 50 snowbush on my Depot. The nursery rep made a sign that read, "Does well in USDA zones 10/11, loves bright sun, any kind of soil!" While those things are true, Phoenix is zone 10, and so is Miami - where the snowbush can actually live. I love snowbush, I saw a magnificent one on Maui that was about 8' tall, but I would never try to grow one in Phoenix!
I'm writing this because I know that running a nursery is a tough business, with razor thin margins. I have no affiliation with Star Nursery. As I scrolled through these bad reviews, it emphasized to me how backwards the big stores have trained customers to think. Sure, when you shop most any time of the year, the plants look vibrant and healthy. However most of the plants you are looking at, if they don't sell in a week, get taken back to California and end up compost if they can't be rehabilitated (except for the toxic petunias, those just get burned). That is the truth. Supplying Arizona and Nevada is a huge loss for the big California nurseries, but they do it to keep contracts with Home Depot and Lowe's in California - where their real profit comes from.
A couple years ago while in Spain, I bought a property in Vegas. The seller bought plants from Lowe's on Charleston & Boulder. Mostly lavender, hibiscus, pink jasmine, gardenia, jade, and 20 aeoniums (for pots on a covered patio). I installed everything along with drip irrigation. Within 2 months, every single plant was dead. In May, of this year I gave Star Nursery a try. Yes, it's a very utilitarian set up - it's not there to give you a lovely stroll through a tropical oasis while parrots squawk at you, or to lure you into a higher-margin part of the store. My first impression, was that it was set up for landscaper convenience - that is exactly where you want to buy plants! I walked in to see if they had a tree I have at my place in Spain, which I know as, "pimiento de los monjes," in English that is "monk's pepper (vitex agnus-castus)." To test the staff, I asked a young lady who was watering, if they had any pimiento de los monjes, aka vitex trees. To my surprise, I didn't get a blank stare! She knew exactly where the vitex (commonly known here as chaste trees) were and she led me over to them. Try that at any big box garden center - I guarantee they will have no idea! Did the tree look a little scrappy? Sure, it was a young plant being acclimatized. It was in a 5-gallon, and about 25" tall. It was so cheap, $9.00 I think, that I bought two... while there, I couldn't pass up on also grabbing a pineapple guava, a tecoma yellow bells, a jubilee orange bells, 4 varieties of sage, several pink jasmine, Tuscan blue rosemary, a radiation lantana, a trailing purple lantana, a euphorbia fire sticks, 2 barrel cactus, a hesperaloe, and a caesalpinia red bird! Checking out was fast, and they asked me if I had all the necessary ferts and soil amends. There was a big roll of plastic sheets right by the door to wrap the pots in. I'm sure some people would say most of the stuff I bought looked like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, but before they got hard pruned for winter, both chaste trees reached about 8' tall with 2.5' spokes, and lots of purple blooms. It's aggressive, but I want that - since I have them on the south side of the building and will train them into a canopy I can walk under. The jubilee orange bells got to about 9' tall before I hard pruned it too. I didn't prune the yellow bells yet, see photos I just took tonight, Dec 29th.
I know this was long! If anyone read it all before considering going to Star, I hope I've given you some points to consider. I get nothing out of this other than trying to give Star a fair and accurate review - I want them to be around a long time! read more