Green Thumbs Shell Out
Hundreds for Pricey Plants

For gardeners with a limitless budget, but whose tastes run more toward the conventional than the carnivorous: the $100 day lily.

As more Americans become hooked on gardening, they are going to greater lengths to outdo their neighbors' yards. But for some, spending more time in the garden just isn't cutting it. Green thumbs are shelling out hundreds of greenbacks to ensure they have the rarest flowers on the block -- and now is the time to start many of the pricey bulbs, seeds and lilies for next year's blooms.

"People are tired of seeing the same old thing," says Holley Geary, who runs a day-care center in Stoneham, Mass. She recently spent $60 on 300 Australian delphinium seeds and in March ordered a $158 Ultraviolet Mood day lily from a catalog to guarantee she would have the rare flower in her garden next spring. "If you want something different you have to pay through the nose," she says.

Michael Brunkwilling, an Urbana, Ill., arborist, says he's now willing to pay more than $100 for a single plant. "When I do my designs I want them to be unique."

A couple of years ago, White Flower Farm in Litchfield, Conn., set the standard when it sold out of a few dozen yellow clivia at $950 a plant in a few weeks; now the fashion is for rare breeds of day lilies, an elegant trumpetlike flower, or for multipetaled peonies. Sally Ferguson, a Brooklyn gardener who represents Dutch bulb growers, says it reminds her of "tulip mania," the inflationary spiral that took place in Holland in the 1630s; there's a record from that period of one man trading a row house for a single bulb, she adds.

Why such outrageous prices? "People say, 'Why would someone spend so much on a day lily?' " says Steven Frowine, owner of Great Plant Co., a New Hartford, Conn., specialty-plant retailer that charges more than $100 each for some day lilies and peonies. He says the rare breeds that now sell for such lofty prices won't be more widely available -- or much cheaper -- for about 15 years. "For people who want to be ahead of the curve, the downside is it's more expensive."

Brenda Corning experienced severe sticker shock when she recently decided to upgrade her garden. "I knew my fiance was going to have a coronary when he found out what I was spending," says Ms. Corning, a consultant in Kalamazoo, Mich. To justify buying hundred-dollar peonies, she says she compared the costs of her hobby to his -- golfing. "He saw the big picture."

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