SoapZone Community Message Board

of nursery that sells plants, not the kind that houses babies <g>). Last year, I won a raffle for a gift basket featuring contributions from businesses all over town. Most included a product--apple butter from one of the orchards, samples of coffee from the coffee roaster, a cute set of coasters from the upscale home decor store, etc.--but two gave me gift certificates. The one I used yesterday I mistakenly thought was for $25 and was good for anything. Now I'm not a gardener and have no real affinity for growing things inside or outside (I leave that to Mother Nature and greatly appreciate the results) so I wandered around the (monstrous, huge, overwhelming) nursery/greenhouses/retail space for almost an hour trying to make a selection. The only thing I "needed" or even wanted was some kind of plant food for the tomato plant the neighbor gave me.

Eventually I picked out a couple basil plants (regular and Thai) and a cheap pot to go with my plant food and stepped up to the counter...only to be told the gift certificate was good only for a) a 10" hanging basket OR b) a flat of annuals OR c) 2 one gallon pots of perennials, and was good for a maximum of $24.99. Which was a problem because a) the only 10" hanging baskets they had were...kind of ugly and cost $29.99, b) I hate to plant things so I'm not about to buy something good for only one growing season and that's it and c) I didn't really like any of the perennials, which, incidentally, were $12.99 for a single one gallon pot and thus two would exceed my $24.99 limit. And I really didn't want to spend $$$ on something I didn't want.

But I went ahead and selected an orange/yellow Asiatic lily and a white larkspur, mainly because we don't have anywhere in the yard that gets full sun (both plants are supposedly OK in partial sun) and also because they weren't pink and purple like most of the other flowers (our trim on the house is a sort of orange-y brown and pink and purple flowers would clash, IMO). I brought the plants up to a different counter with a different cashier...she couldn't get the gift certificate to work. So she called over someone that I suspect might be the owner of the place, or maybe a manager...she told the two of us the gift certificate wasn't ringing up because "I didn't have enough items". Um, what? I'd followed the restrictions to the letter, though I was expecting to have to pay a couple bucks more for the plant. She said I "needed" to buy $5 more of something because, and I quote, "you have $30 in plants here". Huh??? Did the gift certificate somehow appreciate in value, go up along with inflation? I've never heard of such a thing. I went back and grabbed the plant food I'd put back* and wound up paying $5 for the two plants I didn't want and the plant food.

* in retrospect, I should've grabbed one of the basil plants, which were $4.99...

** or as Dad pointed out, I could've done absolutely nothing with the gift certificate and just let it expire...

*** I thought about giving it to someone else at the nursery--there were a ton of other people happily buying tons of plants--but nobody had a 10" hanging basket, a flat of annuals or 2 one gallon pots of perennials.

Anyways...I'd never heard of having to spend money to use a gift certificate. Had I been in a better mood, I would've told the boss lady how I'd worked at this very nursery 38 years prior when it was Thomas' Greenhouse and owned by my mom's best friend and her husband. They're both gone now...I'm not sure if they'd be impressed by how big (and expensive!) the place has gotten or be saddened that it no longer feels like your friendly neighborhood nursery where they know you by name. While I was walking around, I was reminiscing a bit; I got a little teary-eyed when I got to the section where the Thomases had their house. I remember going there a handful of times and being entertained every single time by the "secret" passage that connected their living room and their family room (it wasn't really secret but it did have doors that blended into the paneling in both rooms so you had to know where to look). The house was torn down a few years ago so they could add on another greenhouse :-(