My feelings about Hortico are comparable to the way I'd feel about a beloved child or a friend of long standing who goes through a difficult phase, has to be sternly reprimanded and then ignored for some time, and ultimately seems to have recovered and earns guarded trust.
Years ago, I ordered roses from Hortico without fear. They did have a silly habit of listing many roses that were unavailable and putting them on "back order" (a misnomer, because they rarely appeared after that), but the roses they did send were wonderful and grew into large and vigorous rose bushes. Some of the largest rose bushes I own came from Hortico in those years.
Then they went into a slump and I started receiving a few mislabeled roses in each order. The plants sometimes looked sickly or even dead, and worst of all, they occasionally left some out of the shipping box but never neglected to charge me for them.
I sent messages about dead, mislabeled, and missing roses to customer service, which invariably said I would receive replacements, but I never did. Finally, after a year and a half of correspondence, during which four different customer service representatives promised replacements that never arrived, I wrote to management and promptly received a box of roses labeled with all of the names of my dead, mislabeled, and missing roses. The only problem is that all of them were dead -- stone-cold dead. I realized there was no point in pursuing the matter and simply took them off my list.
In the last couple of years I'd been hearing rumors that Hortico had shaped up and was no longer guilty of any of those sins. Best of all, they were listing only the roses in stock, so there was no longer any chance of anything being put on "back order" for the next five years.
After Janice (sandnsea2) posted a photo of the roses she had just received from Hortico in the rose forum, I placed an order for nine roses. They arrived yesterday and they look really good. The accuracy of the labeling remains to be seen, of course, but if they turn out to be the roses I ordered, Hortico will be back on my list for annual orders.
They are supposed to be: Magic Beauty, Martha Allen, Audrey Wilcox, Creme Caramel, Darling Annabelle, Expression, Sweet Juliet, William Morris, and Just Joey. All but Just Joey will be new to my garden.
Hortico's prices and shipping charges are exceptionally low: The nine roses cost $134.91 ($14.99 each) and all nine were shipped to me from Ontario for $19.00.
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hortico Roses by sandnsea2 | Mar 31, 2012 4:53 PM | 9 |
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