If you have gardeners on your holiday gift list, you can easily accommodate them from the comfort of your own home. Gift certificates to nurseries in the hometown of your recipients, or from catalogues, are always well received.
A gift certificate is like gold to an avid gardener and generates real anticipation and excitement as gardeners wait all winter to buy plants for next year’s flowers. Nothing excites a true gardener more than having money in hand, on that first visit to a nursery in the early spring. Additionally, online browsing of gardening sites is the way many gardeners manage to get through the winter. They dream of getting into their gardens again as they surf the web, thinking about acquiring new items to plant in their yards as soon as the warm weather arrives.
Gardeners never have enough plants, so you can never go wrong with a gift certificate that can be cashed in for plants. I speak from experience when I say that a holiday gift certificate to be used in the subsequent spring is the ideal way to please the avid gardeners on your list. Gardeners are addicted to plants and they NEVER have enough!
Note: The Phalaenopsis orchid, common name “moth” orchid is the most popular flowering plant purchased world-wide. They last from 7-10 months if you buy one with a lot of unopened buds and need very little water as they are epiphytes or “air” plants that grow in trees in the wild.
They are inexpensive (about $9.95) as hostess gifts and can be found in the grocery store so are easy to buy as last-minute gifts, even for non -gardeners. Buy the single-colored ones as the bicolored and unusual looking ones have usually been injected with an artificial dye. If the tag tells you to water with ice cubes, melt the ice cubes in a cup and then pour the water on the plant when it is warm, as the orchids do not like to be cold, as they are tropical plants. The “ice cube” watering is so you won’t pour too much water onto them, as they are susceptible to rot.
This is Moya Andrews, and today we focused on gifts for gardeners.
