Buying Plants Online in Australia: What to Look for in a Good Online Nursery
There was a time when buying plants meant driving to a nursery, wandering around for forty minutes, falling in love with six things you absolutely did not come for, trying to fit a tree into the passenger seat and driving home with potting mix all over the car.
Actually, that still happens. We own a nursery. We fully support this behaviour.
But buying plants online has completely changed what Australian gardeners can get their hands on. You can sit at home with a coffee, work out exactly what you need for that bare fence, impossible bank or garden bed you've been staring at for three years, and have the plants turn up at your door.
The problem is that buying a living thing online is slightly different from ordering a pair of shoes.
A beautiful photograph doesn't tell you whether that plant will cope with your soil. A description saying “fast growing” doesn't tell you whether it will eventually eat half the backyard. A cheap plant isn't particularly cheap if it's the wrong plant, arrives in terrible condition or needs replacing six months later.
And perhaps most importantly, the biggest plant isn't necessarily the best plant to buy online.
So if you're looking for an online nursery in Australia, here's what we'd actually look for — from people who spend an unreasonable amount of their lives growing, packing, posting and talking about plants.
First, don't choose the nursery. Choose the right plant.
This sounds backwards, particularly coming from an online nursery.
Surely we'd prefer you to arrive at The Plant Hub, fill your cart and ask questions later.
We wouldn't.
Because the quickest way to convince someone they're terrible at gardening is to sell them a plant that never had much chance of succeeding where they put it.
Before buying anything, work out what the position is actually like. How much sun does it receive? Is that gentle morning sun or blazing western afternoon sun? What happens after heavy rain? Is the soil sandy and fast draining, heavy clay, permanently damp or so dry that water runs straight off it? Is the site exposed to wind or salt? How much room is there once the plant is mature?
Then ask what job you need the plant to do.
Do you need privacy? Ground coverage? A low border? Something underneath a window? A plant for wet ground? Something to cover a bank? A hedge? Flowers? Foliage? Habitat? Something that can survive a garden owner who occasionally forgets the garden exists?
Start with the problem. Then find the plant.
A good online nursery should help you do that.
A good plant description should tell you more than “easy to grow”
If every plant on a website is “hardy, versatile and perfect for any garden”, I'd be getting suspicious.
No plant is perfect for every garden.
Good plant information should help you decide against buying something just as readily as it helps you decide to buy it.
We want to know mature height and width. Sun requirements. Water requirements. Soil preferences. Climate considerations. Growth habit. Flowering. What the plant is actually useful for.
If it's a groundcover, how far can it spread?
If it's a screening plant, how wide will it become?
If it's going underneath a window, are you going to spend the next decade pruning it below the windowsill?
If you're buying twenty plants for a garden bed, how far apart should they actually be planted?
These aren't tiny details.
They're the difference between designing the garden once and redesigning it with a chainsaw in five years.
Mature size matters far more than the size of the plant that arrives
This is one of the biggest mistakes people make when buying plants online.
They look at the plant in the pot.
We look at the plant in three years.
A little Aussie Rambler™ sitting in tubestock doesn't look like something capable of covering a substantial patch of ground. A young Meema™ Hardenbergia doesn't yet show you the broad ground layer it can become. A small Callistemon Slim™ certainly doesn't look like a future screening plant.
But you're not really buying the plant that's in the box.
You're buying the plant it becomes.
That's why mature dimensions matter so much.
It is also why we'd be very wary of buying more plants simply because they look small when they arrive. Tubestock is supposed to be small. The whole point is to establish those young plants in your garden and let them grow into the space.
Plant twenty where ten mature plants will fit and eventually you'll have twenty plants competing for the room intended for ten.
Plants do not respect the fact that you paid for all of them.
Is buying tubestock online worth it?
For many gardens, absolutely.
We are admittedly biased here because tubestock is what we do at The Plant Hub, but there's a very practical reason for it.
When you're landscaping an entire garden, planting a hedge, covering a bank, mass planting grasses or filling a large garden bed, the cost of buying advanced plants adds up remarkably quickly.
Then you have to move them.
Then dig holes for them.
Then potentially pay to freight enormous pots full of growing media around Australia.
Tubestock flips that equation around.
You're buying a younger plant with a smaller root system, which makes plants much easier and more economical to transport and allows you to plant larger numbers without spending the landscaping budget before you've reached the second garden bed.
Young plants can also establish remarkably well when planted correctly because much of their root development happens in the soil where they'll actually spend their lives.
But there is a trade-off.
Tubestock requires patience.
If you want an instant hedge next Thursday, young plants probably aren't going to satisfy you. If you're prepared to establish them properly and let them grow, however, the difference between the little plant you unpack and the garden it eventually creates can be extraordinary.
Don't confuse small with poor quality.
They're two completely different things.
Look at the roots, not just the leaves
Plants are one of the few things we buy where most of the important machinery is hidden.
Everyone looks at the foliage.
We're interested in what's happening underneath it.
A healthy root system is enormously important when a plant has to make the transition from nursery pot to garden soil. Plants that have spent too long confined can become heavily root-bound, while weak or unhealthy root systems can struggle after planting regardless of how lovely the foliage looked in the photograph.
This is another reason bigger isn't automatically better.
An enormous plant in a relatively small pot isn't necessarily a bargain.
You're not buying leaves by the kilogram.
You're buying something that needs to establish.
Be suspicious of plant photographs that do all the selling
Plant photography is useful. Of course it is.
You want to know what something looks like.
But there are two photographs I'd like to see in my head when buying a plant online.
The first is the beautiful mature plant.
The second is where I'm actually going to put it.
That's the photograph people forget.
That gorgeous flowering shrub may look spectacular photographed in a large garden, but if you've got 70 centimetres between the driveway and the front path, we have a small logistical problem.
This is particularly important when shopping online because photographs make it incredibly easy to buy emotionally.
Ohhhhhh.
Purple flowers.
Add to cart.
We've all been there.
Take thirty seconds and check the dimensions.
Future You will appreciate it.
Buying plants online gives you one enormous advantage
Research.
At a physical nursery, it's very easy to walk past a plant, fall in love with it and buy it before you've worked out where it's going.
Online, you can have seventeen tabs open like a completely normal person.
You can compare plants.
Measure the garden.
Look at mature dimensions.
Read about your soil.
Work out your climate.
Calculate quantities.
Come back tomorrow.
Ask questions.
That ability to research before buying is one of the biggest advantages of buying plants online, and it's something I think the horticultural industry should lean into much harder.
An online nursery shouldn't simply be a digital shelf full of plants.
It should help you make the decision.
That's exactly what we're trying to build at The Plant Hub.
How do you know which plants will grow in your part of Australia?
This is where things become more complicated than the words “Australian native” or “full sun”.
Australia is enormous.
A garden in subtropical Queensland doesn't experience the same conditions as one in inland New South Wales, coastal Victoria, Adelaide or Perth.
Even two gardens in the same suburb can behave differently.
One is exposed to western sun.
One sits behind the house in afternoon shade.
One has beautiful soil somebody has been improving for twenty years.
The other is a new build where the “soil” appears to be six centimetres of topsoil covering something last seen on a road construction site.
This is why we've been building so much gardening information into The Plant Hub rather than simply listing plants.
We've written guides about full sun, western sun, clay soil, wet soil, dry shade, coastal gardens, planting under trees, narrow garden beds, slopes, mass planting, watering, plant spacing and why native plants die because those are the things you actually need to understand before choosing a plant.
The goal isn't to sell you a plant.
It's to help you find your plant.
An online nursery should tell you the actual cultivar
This matters more than many people realise.
“Westringia” isn't one plant.
Neither is Lomandra, Dianella, Callistemon or Murraya.
Different cultivars can have very different mature sizes, growth habits and landscape uses.
Take Westringia.
A compact selection such as Grey Box™ has a completely different job in a garden from a low spreading selection such as Low Horizon™.
One might be useful where you want compact structure.
The other can be used as a broad, low foliage layer.
Buying something labelled simply “Westringia” when you're designing a particular space doesn't tell you enough.
The cultivar matters.
The mature habit matters.
The job matters.
And if you're buying a specific named cultivar, you should receive the specific plant you ordered.
How many plants do I need?
Here is where a very innocent online shopping trip can go spectacularly off course.
You have a ten-metre garden bed.
The plants look tiny.
Twenty-four should do it.
Maybe thirty.
Add to cart.
Stop.
The quantity you need should be based on the mature spread of the plant and the effect you're trying to achieve, not how lonely the tubes look on planting day.
For a hedge, you're considering the length of the hedge and appropriate spacing for that particular plant.
For a garden bed, you're considering square metres.
For a groundcover, you're thinking about how wide each plant can eventually spread and how quickly you want coverage.
Closer spacing can give faster coverage but costs more and may create unnecessary competition later. Wider spacing costs less but takes longer to fill.
There is usually a sensible middle ground.
Measure first.
Buy second.
This is precisely why we've been developing our Plant Spacing Calculator — because “How many plants do I need?” is one of those questions that sounds simple until you're standing in front of a 37-square-metre garden bed wondering whether you need 40 plants or 140.
What happens when plants are sent through the post?
This is the part that makes people nervous if they've never bought plants online before.
Fair enough.
Plants aren't books.
They have leaves.
They have roots.
They object to being turned upside down.
Packing plants for freight is therefore completely different from putting a normal product into a box.
The aim is to protect the root system, hold the plants securely enough that they aren't bouncing around during transit and get them to their destination as efficiently as possible.
And occasionally, despite everybody's best efforts, a parcel can have a rough journey.
We've seen boxes arrive looking as though someone between here and the customer's front door briefly mistook them for sporting equipment.
That's why I'd always check an online nursery's shipping information and what happens if something genuinely goes wrong in transit.
A good nursery should not disappear the moment the parcel leaves the building.
Don't panic if a plant doesn't look Instagram-ready when you open the box
This is worth talking about because live plants behave differently from ordinary products.
A plant that's spent several days travelling in a dark box may not look exactly like a plant sitting freshly watered on a nursery bench.
There may be some bent foliage.
A little yellowing.
A broken leaf.
Some plants may simply look mildly offended by the entire experience.
That doesn't necessarily mean the plant is unhealthy.
The important things are the health of the plant, its roots and growing point, and how it recovers after unpacking.
Unpack plants promptly. Check them. Follow the nursery's arrival instructions. Give them appropriate light and water rather than immediately putting a travel-weary shade-grown plant into the fiercest sun available because you want to “toughen it up”.
And if something genuinely isn't right, photograph it and contact the nursery.
Preferably before nursing it for three weeks and then sending a photograph of what is now essentially a twig.
It's much easier for everyone to work out what happened at the beginning.
Check where the nursery actually ships
Australia has strict biosecurity rules for good reason.
Moving plant material can move pests, diseases, soil organisms and weeds with it.
Interstate plant movement is therefore not as simple as putting an address on a box and hoping for the best. Requirements differ depending on the destination and the plant material involved, and some areas have additional restrictions.
If you're buying plants online, check that the nursery can legally send the plants you've chosen to your location.
A responsible nursery should make its shipping restrictions clear and comply with the requirements that apply to the destinations it services.
A plant bargain stops being a bargain fairly quickly if it can't legally get to you.
Cheap plants and good-value plants are not necessarily the same thing
This applies online and in physical nurseries.
Price matters.
Of course it does.
If you're planting 100 plants, even a few dollars per plant makes an enormous difference.
But value includes more than the number beside the Add to Cart button.
Look at plant quality.
Look at the information provided.
Look at freight.
Look at mature size.
Look at whether you're buying the correct cultivar.
Look at how many plants you actually need.
And look at whether the plant is appropriate for the position.
A $5 plant that dies is considerably more expensive than an $8 plant that grows.
Likewise, an expensive advanced plant isn't necessarily better value than young tubestock if both will ultimately perform the same job and you're prepared to wait for growth.
The cheapest way to landscape is usually not buying the cheapest plant.
It's avoiding buying the wrong plant twice.
Should you buy Australian native plants online?
Absolutely — provided you still choose them according to the site.
We love Australian natives, but we've just written an entire guide about the myth that Australian native automatically means indestructible.
It doesn't.
Australia contains rainforest, wetlands, alpine environments, dry country, coastal heath, grasslands and everything in between.
So if you're buying Australian native plants online, don't stop at:
Native? Tick.
Look at what that particular plant wants.
A Tanika® Lomandra and a Soft Twig Rush are both Australian plants.
You wouldn't choose them for exactly the same conditions.
A Meema™ Hardenbergia, Callistemon Slim™, Little Jess™ Dianella and Aussie Rambler™ can all earn their place in an Australian garden, but they're doing completely different jobs.
“Native” is a useful starting point.
It isn't a planting plan.
Should I buy plants online or from a local nursery?
Both.
There. We said it.
And we own both.
A great local nursery gives you something the internet can't completely replace. You can walk around, see plants at different stages, talk to somebody, compare foliage and sometimes discover something you weren't looking for at all.
Online nurseries give you different advantages: searchability, research, access to specialist ranges, easy comparison and the ability to order quantities without driving around trying to find 42 matching plants.
They're not enemies.
They're two ways of buying plants.
Use whichever makes sense for the job.
If you're looking for one beautiful feature plant and want to see it in person, visit a nursery.
If you're landscaping a huge garden bed and need 80 matching Lomandras, suddenly ordering tubestock from the couch starts looking rather attractive.
Where is the best place to buy plants online in Australia?
We're not going to sit here and tell you we're Australia's “best online nursery”.
Apart from sounding ridiculous, the best nursery depends on what you're trying to buy.
Some online nurseries specialise in rare plants. Some are brilliant for fruit trees. Some specialise in indoor plants. Some grow advanced plants. Some focus heavily on Australian natives.
The Plant Hub specialises in quality tubestock for Australian gardens and landscaping.
Our range is particularly strong in Australian native plants, Lomandra, Dianella, Westringia, groundcovers, hedging and screening plants, ornamental grasses, wetland plants and selected flowering varieties.
That means we're particularly useful when you're doing more than filling one empty pot.
Maybe you're planting 30 metres of hedge.
Maybe you've got a bare bank.
Maybe the front garden needs fifty plants and you'd prefer to retain enough money to eat afterwards.
Maybe you're a landscaper planting hundreds.
Or maybe you're not a gardener at all and you've simply got a horrible patch beside the fence and would quite like somebody to tell you what will grow there.
That's the part of online plant shopping we're most interested in.
Not simply:
Here's a plant. Buy it.
But:
Here's your garden problem. Let's work out what belongs there.
What should I look for before ordering plants online?
If you've made it this far and would like the short version, here it is.
Before you order, make sure you know what the plant will eventually become, not just what it looks like today. Check its mature height and width, preferred sun and soil, water needs and whether it suits your climate and the job you're asking it to do. Work out how many you genuinely need. Check shipping restrictions and delivery information. Understand the size of plant you're buying. And buy from somewhere willing to give you enough information to make a sensible decision.
Then when the plants arrive, remember that the job isn't finished.
You still have to grow them.
Water them properly while they establish. Don't bury them in mulch. Don't plant them too deeply. Keep an eye on the soil rather than following a watering calendar blindly.
And give them some time.
Gardens don't arrive in boxes.
They grow.
Buying plants online should make gardening easier
That's really the whole point.
The internet has given gardeners access to an extraordinary range of plants, but more choice isn't particularly useful if nobody helps you choose.
That's why we're building The Plant Hub to be more than an online catalogue.
We want you to be able to arrive because you've Googled what can I plant in full sun, what grows in clay, what should I plant beside my fence, why are my leaves turning brown, how far apart should I plant my hedge, or how often should I water my plants — and actually leave understanding the answer.
Sometimes that answer will lead to a plant we sell.
Sometimes it won't.
We're okay with that.
Because the best way for an online nursery to earn your business isn't to convince you that every plant is perfect.
It's to help you choose one that actually grows.
And if a little box of tubestock turns up at your door looking nowhere near big enough to become the garden you have in your head?
Give it time.
That's the fun bit.