Before you buy new plants for your garden, no matter where you are getting them from, there are a number of things you should look for to determine whether or not it is good enough to plant, although the chances are that there is less likelihood of disease if you buy your new plants from a reputable garden centre or nursery. The main thing you are looking for is the health of the plant you are thinking of buying as you don't want to introduce new diseases to you garden that might spread to your other flowers and plants.

Having said that a reputable garden centre or nursery is the best place to buy your new plants that doesn't mean it is impossible for these plants to have diseases, so you still need to be careful and inspect the plants carefully before handing over your money.

You might think that you don't know enough about plants to determine if they are healthy or not, but you can apply some common sense which will normally serve you well. If a plant looks unhealthy, then the chances are it is unhealthy and you should steer clear of buying it. Plants that are unhealthy will generally show symptoms of it.

The main things to look at are the leaves, roots and stems of the plant as closely as you can. The other thing to take into consideration is the soil the plant has been grown in as this will give you a good idea whether or not the plants has been well looked after. The wrong type of soil or compost can have a huge effect on the ability of a plant to flourish.

If you are looking to buy some nicely coloured new flowers for your garden, don't necessarily go for the ones with fully open flowers that look impressive. Normally the ones to go for are the ones that are yet to flower. One of the reasons for this is transport. If your plant has already flowered the chances are the flowers will get damaged during transportation home. Also, plants that are yet to flower have still got quite an amount of energy stored up that they haven't yet used up on flowers and so they are more able to withstand the trauma of moving
them into your garden.

If the garden centre are down to their last few specimens of a plant or flower that you really do want to buy then it may be beneficial to remove all the flowers. While this may sound counterintuitive, it is thought that this will give the plant a much better chance of survival and may actually lead to more and better flowers in the long run.

Again, all of this is mostly down to common sense. If something doesn't look right about a particular plant that you are thinking of buying the ask for advice or better still, don't buy it and find either a better specimen or go for something different.