Buying plants online ideal for adding perennials to your garden

Remember when the mid-morning weekday doorbell meant one of two things: Jehovah’s Witnesses looking to save your soul, or charity collectors with rattling tins? Online shopping has changed everything. Now the doorbell could signal a much-awaited dress, a critical replacement phone charger or, even better, a box of new plants.

My first Sydney garden was a romantic and flowery affair squeezed into a sunny terrace backyard. Filling it with roses and foxgloves and catmint and achillea and lady’s mantle required many journeys to nurseries at Dural for replacement plants. Drive and buy on Saturday, plant and admire on Sunday.

If I were making such a garden now, I’d do all my buying online. The perennials that make what was then a cottage garden and is now a modern flower garden (inspired by international designers such as Piet Oudolf and locals such as Melbourne’s Ian Barker) are perfect plant material to send by mail order.

Best known of the perennial online nurseries is Lambley, outside Ballarat. Its owner David Glen is a renowned plantsman and inspiring gardener. Don’t miss an opportunity to visit if you are nearby. Closer to home in NSW are Perennialle Plants in Canowindra and Nutshell Nursery at Wallendbeen, between Cootamundra and Harden. All three specialise in drought-hardy perennials that cope with a freezing-to-boiling range of conditions.

To make sure the plants you buy suit your climate, your best bet might be Yellow House Nursery in Nowra on the South Coast, where the weather is mild in winter and humid in summer, just like Sydney. Owner Mim Burkett ran a nursery in Glenorie back in the 1980s, on tank water in the drought. “I swore I was never doing that again,’’ she says. ‘‘But then a bushfire burned us out, we moved to Nowra, started gardening again and a decade or so later, opened the garden for Open Gardens Australia. I thought I’d just pot up a few plants to sell on the day...”

Yellow House has been online for a year, mailing out about 150 plants a week. Burkett loves the email interaction with customers, that has her dreaming of their gardens as she packs their plants. Her plant list focuses on old-fashioned perennials, “the sort of things that endure, and which flowered year after year when people had no water and no fertilisers”. Things such as penstemons, which she loves for their plentiful bell flowers, salvias, and hardy little artemisias, which offer the silver-grey tones that can be hard to come by in Sydney’s humid conditions.

Not sure about the thrill of plants in the post? Both Yellow House and Perennialle are exhibiting at the Australian Garden Show Sydney, in Centennial Park from September 4-7. Burkett plans to bring lots of rosemary: ‘‘I have about 20, pinks and whites, and different fragrances.’’

She will also bring salvias, species geraniums and rudbeckias, among others. ‘‘Lots of lovely things!”

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