Durham Garden Center

Cool Garden Center with Larger Outdoor Space! Sweet Staff, very Laid-​Back! They had some Sturdy, though flexible Rubber Buckets (in a Variety of sizes and colors) that I wanted to say I need that for, SOMEthing!
Plants, Trees looked Great! Looked Very Healthy! Their Fertilizer Section was Bigger than some Larger Plant Shops!

Great plants, tons of pots/​ceramics for indoor plants, and very friendly and helpful staff. This is so much better than going to Lowe’s. I will be back!

I really, really wanted to write a nice review for this place. My garden consultant recommended them and I’m all about supporting a local business. In fact, I drove 10 minutes out of my way to support a local business as opposed to the Lowes that is down the road. I spent a good amount of money to get my garden set up for spring. I bought a dog repellent for the garden because they swore to me that it was the best and worked really well. Well, it didn’t work at all. The dogs walked on it, peed on it, sniffed it, were not repelled at all. I tried spraying it again, same thing.
So, no big deal, I went back to return it. But I was met with a somewhat willing store credit offer. However, this was after the woman in charge, or at least she seemed to be in charge because she was ordering people around, told (with a bit of an attitude) one of her underlings in front of me ‘Just throw the spray in the trash. There’s nothing I can do with it.’ What happened to good customer service?
Here’s the situation. The product didn’t work. I had the receipt. I returned it. It’s not my problem what you do with it after that. And I certainly don’t need to be made to feel guilty about it. I decided to buy something else since I didn’t need to have a small amount of store credit floating around. So, I went out back to look at plants. They do have a fairly nice selection. I asked a woman putting out plants and organizing them, ‘Do you have Iceland Poppies?’. She said, ‘No, we don’t have any of those’. I went into the next row of plants, literally six feet from where I was standing before and looked down and saw two of them. I pointed it out to her and she basically said– ‘Oh’. No apology or anything. Weird.
Okaaaaaaay. Back to checkout. I just wanted to get my couple of things with store credit and go. I had basically figured out in my head that I would owe them about a dollar with my store credit applied. One lady was checking me out. The manager was sitting behind the counter with another guy trying to give orders to her. It took these three people between 5 and 10 minutes to figure this out. (And I don’t know exactly how long because I put my dollar down, told them I didn’t care about the change and left.) I also noticed that the woman who was standing in line behind me (there is only one register) put her items back and left the store, not wanting to wait any longer.
Durham Garden Center, I like your store and your offerings but your staff really, really needs some help. To compete with the larger stores, I would hope that your strength would be in your customer service. I am sharing this feedback so you can hopefully make some changes. I would be willing to give you another try in the future if you do.

I randomly passed it on the way to the Eno River Quarry and had to stop in. The staff are friendly and helpful. I needed gypsum (which none of the big brand stores like Home Depot carried, or even hear of) and the lady found it for me right away. They had a great selection of herbs, which we got on sale ($ 1.50). They also a large number of non-​edible plants as well as an abundance of gardening supplies. It’s not too big, but worth a visit.