Cottage Garden

Adventurous gardeners everywhere, welcome to Cottage Garden ! In business for 24 years, and gardeners for many more, we are a well known and popular destination nursery in southwestern Illinois , near St. Louis , Missouri . Our specialty? Plants that really work in hot and humid summer climates and cold winters. Enter our website for truly unique plants, and amazing ideas on how to use them in containers and beds. Our tropical plant listing continues to grow, trial tested in containers (our specialty) and display beds throughout the nursery area. I love color, texture and architecture in my plants, and continually seek out a diversified plant palette that never seems to stop growing. Yes, I am truly among the horticulturally addicted.

HOT NEWS! Please join our email list if you wish to continue to receive our spring newsletter and notices. We are no longer mailing our flyer via the postal service, in an effort to hold down costs and go ‘green’. We promise not to pester you with weekly emails, just springtime information with opening dates and occasional notices of promotions.

We are very excited to be joining the Goshen Farmers’ Market in Edwardsville, Illinois this summer (www.goshenmarket.org) located next to the county courthouse on Saturdays from eight to twelve noon. Many of our rare and unusual plants will be featured and available for sale. If you simply cannot make the trip to our Piasa nursery (a 35 minute drive from Edwardsville), plan on visiting us on Saturdays and enjoying the many other venues this charming market has to offer.

As the turmoiled world around us continually changes, we have come to depend on our gardens as a sanctuary. Peace and solace are always there, and we are so blessed with the beauty of the natural world. With this in mind, we are ready to launch a new season here at Cottage Garden for 2009 with a host of wonderful new plants that includes over 100 new tropicals, notably the amazing new elephant ear Colocasia ‘Diamond Head’. Go ahead and dream about glorious container gardens and tropical beds, alight with butterflies and hummingbirds, and in the evening, night flying pollinators and mystical fragrance. It’s all there, right at your fingertips! Be sure to check out our new Succulent listing on the tropicals page. These trendy, low maintenance plants are so very beautiful, bringing amazing shapes, textures, and color to low maintenance container gardens.

We are happy to announce our new listings of native American cultivars (a new word here, ‘nativars’), the hottest category of perennials right now, beloved for their affinity with our native insects and birds, low care, and dependable color. Vernonia lettermanii ‘Iron Butterfly’ offers late season color with a compact habit more suitable for modern gardens. Lobelia cardinalis ‘Fried Green Tomatoes’ is a super vigorous selection of our native cardinal flower, a premier hummingbird attractor bringing hot color for mid to late summer.

Bill and I are especially proud to host a large selection of plants from the Missouri Botanical Garden ’s Plants of Merit program (plantsofmerit.org). These under utilized, lesser known plants are selected by the staff at MoBot for outstanding qualities and performance in our lower Midwest climate, where hot and humid summers, cold winters, and wide climatic swings prevail. They are tough stuff!

Proudly, we are one of the few nurseries who have succeeded in juggling a retail walk-in business with a shipping department. Visitors are always delighted in our many display beds and containers, and our greenhouses are chock full of rare plant treasures in springtime. Mail orders receive our personal attention and we ship healthy, husky, and well rooted plants with many satisfied customers. Our shipping department continues to grow, and we take great personal pride in our quality and service. Try us, you'll love us!!

Interested in joining our mail list? Email us, call or write us with your name and address.

Chris Kelley

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