Avant Gardens

This is a wonderful nursery for unusual, special and essential plants for the garden. The proprietors are knowledgable and creative, friendly, helpful and dedicated to their work. Terrific website and blog, as well. Check online for their hours of operation. I start the planting season here every year!

If you live in Eastern Massachusetts and desire plants that are unusual and dramatic make a visit to Avant gardens. We discovered them about 12 years ago in a write-​up in the Boston Globe, and on a sunny mid-​May Saturday we drove down and were really impressed by their wonderful plant stock.
Here you will find most everything that British gardener Christopher Lloyd grew in his stunning exotic garden at his home Great Dixter. Wonderful dahlias, cannas, little known varieties of coleus, along with some great unusual nicotianas, and intense salvias. The selection of hostas is equally great and their is a small but once again highly interesting variety of trees and shrubs, including one of my favorites, an upright plum-​colored European beech called ‘Red Obelisk.‘
The owners take their business seriously, and I have a few times bought so much that I almost felt guilty of taking their carefully tended youngsters.