Meadow Brook Hall, home of Matilda Dodge Wil­son, Rochester Hills, Michigan

I don’t imag­ine Matilda Dodge Wil­son of the auto­mo­tive Dodges wor­ried too much about being thrifty in her gar­den. We, how­ever, are on a dif­fer­ent planet from Matilda. There­fore I would like to sug­gest other ways to save money on plants besides mar­ry­ing up:

• Plant self-​sowing plants.
• Buy perennials..I replaced my impa­tiens with suc­cu­lents many years ago and have never looked back,
• Trade with friends or gar­den club mem­bers (I’m always try­ing to find a home for succulents).
• Buy plants that are guar­an­teed. If your plant dies you can take it back.
• Sub­scribe to the many nurs­ery web­sites that offer coupons and give noti­fi­ca­tion of sales. I give the web­site addresses on my data­base to the left.
• Buy the next size down from what you would nor­mally buy; many plants grow really fast and some­times you can find some­thing that needs to be re-​potted up to a larger size.
• Buy qual­ity from a cer­ti­fied nursery.
• Buy SoCal accli­mated and/​or native plants which have a bet­ter sur­vival rate.
• And last but not least, be a knowl­edge­able and dili­gent gardener.

You may have won­dered how I got from Los Ange­les to Rochester Hills, Michi­gan. I am for­tu­nate in that my sis­ter Mary Lynn, a won­der­ful gar­dener in her own right, lives there. I love vis­it­ing there in the sum­mer and fall. It’s very fer­tile ground for gar­den ideas. For more infor­ma­tion on Meadow Brook Hall, go to www​.oak​land​.edu/​m​bh/.