How a New Gardener Got Bamboozled by Catalog Shenanigans

Of all the seed and plant catalogs that pile up on my desk this time each year, Klehm’s Song Sparrow  is my favorite with Baker Creek coming in a close second. The gorgeous, color photography is what hooks me in both cases.

Though I admit that the fact that I can get actual plants rather than just seeds makes Klehm’s close to my heart, too. Some years, I just don’t feel like firing up the seed-starting setup in the basement. I want that spring miracle of small boxes showing up at the door filled with seedlings smelling of wet peat and dirt.

When I was just starting out as a gardener, I didn’t think much about the difference between catalogs. While most have actual photos and detailed plant information, others use illustrations at least some of the time. Catalogs in the latter group are not always to be tossed in the recycling bin straight away, but I learned after some painful planting mishaps that some were not to be trusted.

While experienced gardeners know to raise their eyebrows over, say, an illustration of a supposedly ginormous lilac hedge towering over an adult woman, beginner me saw only promise. Why wouldn’t everyone just plant this sort of fast-growing beauty, I wondered, marveling at the purplish flowers dangling from the fictional lilac hedge, flowers that had I thought about scale, would have to have been much, much larger than the woman’s head.

I’m not saying that all catalog illustrations are a trick, though. I did order a Harry Lauder’s Walking Stick (a contorted filbert tree) years ago that was advertised only as an illustration—and a very hard-to-believe illustration at that. I admit that I love that spooky tree with its weird, corkscrew branches. No, it did not grow to its advertised 10-feet tall, but that’s okay.