Reading Companula's requirements, my first thought was of the late Mike Lowe and the many roses he imported from Europe to his New Hampshire garden with its short season and often sub-zero conditions. Roses he propagated from some of those carefully tended imports eventually grew in my garden, many hundreds of miles south of New Hampshire. They immediately 'took off', and have flourished to a degree that might well have left Mike dumbstruck.

Of course there are plants one MUST avoid due to one's environment (syringas, for instance, promptly drop dead upon arrival in my neck of the woods). Otherwise, I've found plants to be far more forgiving and adaptable than the gardeners who grow them.

Having seen (via photographs) an astounding collection of Agaves growing in Oxfordshire, I wholeheartedly agree!

I've lived in northern Ohio, and the Great Lakes area of New York, and both of those areas have a strong background in agriculture. Even though many areas up there are no longer being farmed, much of the land has been turned into subdivisions and if the topsoil has not been removed, the available soil is wonderful stuff. In the spring, after all that snow, it's a beautiful time of year, and people want to get out and find a garden center or nursery pick up a basket of flowers, or a flat of vegetables or perennials.

The economy does factor in now, and there are fewer "mom and pop" garden centers that take the time to sow seeds over the winter, and the box stores have certainly made it more difficult. But it also depends on your mindset, if you are of the "back to nature" type, then you will take the time to either sow your own seeds, or find a local nursery out in the country, or hunt down a brave nursery person who supplies city bound people something that is more rare these days.

A lot of people are of the view that gardens, and plants in general are a nuisance, and are too difficult to deal with, many people just like a container or a windowbox of annuals or geraniums and call it good. They get a 'theme' going and every year it's the same vendor, the same plant choice, and the same color, and get quite distressed when those plans fall through.

It's taken me a few years to let them have their view, but if I were in the growing business, I'd have to have to supply those types of people and hopefully get them to try a similar color, or a plant with similar cultural requirements as well.

I'm in a tough spot, where all the different climates come together, and while there are a few independant garden centers around, they generally ship in plugs of hosta and perennials, and the woody materials are shipped from warmer climates. While those are good and well, I have to send for things well outside of my state. I'm glad to support any nursery person with my purchases, I just wish I could get larger specimens and the shipping were less. It's about 50 miles to the closest major town, and the only choices are the box stores, and one nursery who specializes in Japanese maples, and other exotics that hate our hot dry summers.

(I do take the time to drive down to Arkansas to a native plants nursery, and she is a true nurserywoman, and a biologist by training.) She does ship, but not sure if to Europe...and we all have our own native plants that make our areas special, and we can then enjoy and share those places as unique unto themselves.

I'd love to order roses locally, but for me, the closest nurseries are still several hundred miles away.

From a rose manufacturers point of view the best places to grow roses in the USA are in warm climates. They can grow bigger plants faster to get to the market place. They don't make money on roses in the growing fields but on the ones they can ship out. So they want to ship them quick to get their return. As a result most all of the big growers and suppliers have been in Texas and California.

I do buy from my local nurseries but chances are they got those roses, bare root, in the beginning of the year from a grower down south and just potted them up and grew them out in their greenhouse for sale here in May. I don't know of any local nurseries that have growing fields in Michigan. It would take years, with our short season, to grow them big enough for sale and wouldn't be profitable. So they order the bare roots from the big growers and then they charge more for their time and effort of potting and growing them to make a profit too. Even with postage sometimes it's cheaper for me to order it direct myself.

There's also the matter of availability of different varieties. For the most part the local nurseries all get the same old, same old, year after year except for one or two of the new intros for that year. Which ever ones Star, Weeks or J&P are pushing that season. If I want something different I have to order it.

If I had to confine myself to only plants that originated in Michigan I'd be growing a lot of the local weeds. Which I do anyway!

The closest I have come to practicing what you're asking has been purchasing plants in the climate zone I was to install them. I wouldn't buy roses in the mid desert to be installed at the beach, though ordering them from the local nurseries in that area results in them ordering them from the mid desert grower and shipping them in. Purchasing the ones which have grown at the beach a while and acclimated to the milder, wetter conditions better shows which will adapt and perform better to those conditions. Buying potted annuals and perennials in the damper climate zones to be planted in those conditions permits them to be installed and perform more successfully without showing displeasure at the changed conditions. If I'm buying for myself, and find what I desire in the coastal area, knowing it can be grown in my more desert like conditions, I will often buy it there and then harden it off to my more severe conditions before planting it. But, you know the issues when installing a plant for someone only to have it look "miffed" at going from cool, damp to hot and dry over night. The same holds true for bud and bloom roses. Take anything from "green house conditions" and put it out in the hot, dry sun (and vice versa) and it is going to complain. It may recover, or it may not, but unless you allow for that, with potted plants it can make a real difference.

When ordering bare root or dormant plants, as long as they are suitable for where you intend to grow them, it should make no difference. If planted and cared for properly, they'll break dormancy and grow as they're supposed to. Kim

In our household I'm the more conservative one, while my husband will pick up any plant to try, and is not worried if it survives or not.

And even when selecting native plants, I don't hold the idea I need to plant only natives from my county-I figure the winds blow where they may, and that someone may have picked the last remaining flower on their way west. We won't know unless we try (within reasonable limits).

I now send for roses from the south of Sweden or from abroad and most have thrived, even the roses I imported from the US. The biggest problem with importing is that roses are lifted in winter in warmer climates, much too early for Sweden, so they have to be kept indoors in pots untill spring.

Same goes for food. That's why you don't see the smaller subsistence farms anymore, the Jeffersonian ideal of a citizenry of yeoman farmers, because it's cheaper to specialize and ship. If I were limited to what we can grow here, it would be a boring and limited diet indeed. Our best, most profitable crop is timber. We ship timber world wide. Grains won't hardly grow at all. It's cheaper to grow them in drier eastern Washington and ship. We'd be eating root crops and berries and greens and shellfish and salmon and not much else, if we ate only local stuff.

I used to work at a rhododendron producer. Our climate is fantastic for growing rhodies in gardens, but even so, the babies have to be in climate-controlled greenhouses under 24 hour monitoring, with irrigation, fertilizing, lighting in winter, and fungicides. That nursery ships starter rhodies worldwide, in 2" pots, to wholesalers that grow them on and sell them to retailers. We'd ship tens of thousands of these 2" pots at a time to wholesalers in the southern tier of states, where they don't need to heat or light the greenhouses. They in turn would ship the finished product to retailers up north. So your rhodie you bought in Boston in the northeast came from a grower in Florida who got it from us in the far northwestern corner in Washington state.

Oh, that same nursery ships to UK and Europe too, so you, Campanula, might be buying rhodies or kalmias or azaleas that originated in a tissue culture lab in Elma, Washington. Ain't globalization grand??

The retail nursery in town I used to work at produced some of its own annuals and all its fuchsias but they don't anymore. Cheaper to buy in. Some comes from other parts of Washington, some from Oregon, some from who knows where. They used to grow their own poinsettias from starters too, and they were far and away the best poinsettias in town since they didn't get crushed or temperature-shocked in shipping. That was expensive, heating and lighting those things. They don't do that anymore either.

I like the idea of supporting local producers but since our climate is so cool (plants grow slow and heat is expensive) and our market so small, local producers can't afford to produce a lot of variety. There are no commercial rose producers in my area. I can get snapdragons and pansies and fuchsias and tomato seedlings, but the tomatoes need climate control to produce anything here. Clematis can be obtained from someone in British Columbia just up the road. Heat and light are cheaper in Canada. The northeastern Olympic Peninsula specializes in lavender, so lavender plants are easily obtained here in great variety. There used to be a Japanese maple producer and hybridizer in town but he retired and no one took on the business. Now our Japanese maples all have to come from the big producers in Oregon, though that's only a couple hundred miles away for us. Many local production nurseries have been lost due to increased land valuations as population grows. Urbanization surrounds and kills off nurseries just as it does agriculture in general. The nurseries that do survive do so by getting big and specializing and shipping - just like everything else.

I know that plants have innate environmental tolerances that are not affected by the climate they grew up in, so for me it's not a question of getting a plant that's acclimated. I'd like to support local producers and that's the only reason I'd insist on buying local.

It's only with the proliferation of boutique rose nurseries in the past 30 years or so that one has had the option of buying roses that were grown in South Carolina, the Rockies, or the Midwest. As an exception, for 50 years and more there has been a local rose industry in Florida built around the locally adapted rootstock. Way back, there were grafted rose producers in PA, NJ, and Ohio.

In the US, potted roses are generally acclimated to a greenhouse rather than to a climate. Bare-roots are "acclimated" to a cold-storage facility.

I don't think it makes a bit of difference where the rose was grown unless shipping time is an issue. Adaptation to climate is genetic.