In those days, Wayside gardens exuded class and refinement. Even the typeface was elegant, like Gourmet magazine at the time. They did the best they could with color photography and really were the first company I saw that promoted English-style perennial gardens. You could even order collections of plants for an early or a late summer perennial border. What's a little shocking to remember is that these borders featured virtually no plants selected for foliage. Everything was flowers and these only looked good for a couple months a year, at best. Which is a little funny because as you know Gertrude Jekyll was espousing foliage plants in her books much before this. Anyway, Wayside at the time was a unique mail order source for many useful landscape plants. They had a huge selection of ground covers, hedging plants and of course trees. Even the 'landscape' roses of the day, which featured rugosa hybrids and even some old fashioned roses. 'Robin Hood', 'Gruss an Achen' and 'The Fairy' were popular then for landscaping.

Leaving memory lane, I also pretty much stopped using Parks when they stopped offering annuals and perennial flowers in separate colors and strains. I mean, really, if you go to the trouble of raising things from seed, isn't one of the paybacks that you can be really fussy about what you grow? The Parks color catalog covers were always lurid and tasteless, but I remember liking them when I was a kid.

I crossed Wayside off my list when in later years the quality of their plants went way downhill. Too many things shipped direct from growers, and not of the best quality. Lots of bare-root perennials, which are very tricky and only successful when absolutely fresh, and these often weren't. Plus they were so expensive but happily replaced anything you didn't like, without a peep. When the later generations of home-grown mail order nurseries got started, there was no reason to use Wayside, even though they did offer some really lovely and rare things. Too bad. You can analyze it better than me, but I felt it just became another business run by bean counters with probably way too much overhead and debt. And aside from great customer service, too many other nurseries delivered better plants. I can't think of a good mail-order plant nursery that doesn't raise their own plants, but maybe you can. Thanks. KM