Gardeners are the worst people to buy for in December, and it’s their own fault. They already own the trowel. They own a better trowel than the one you were going to buy them, plus the one they lost in the mulch pile in 2021 and replaced. They have opinions about pruners that they will share. And the one thing they actually want, which is for it to be April, is not available at any price.
This is a problem we think about more than most people, because December is when our garage stops being a garage. Jill and I have 30+ printers running down the wall, and by the first week of the month they’re going most of the night, which means one of us is out there at 11pm in a coat swapping spools while the other one labels boxes at the kitchen table. We ship a lot of gifts to gardeners. We have learned which ones land.
The rule that makes this easy
Don’t buy a gardener a tool. Buy them something to do in the eleven weeks when there is nothing to garden.
Outdoor people spend the winter staring out a window at a yard that is, at best, brown. Give them something growing indoors and you’ve given them a project, which is what they were actually missing. Everything below follows from that.
Which brings up the mistake we watch people make every December: they send the pot empty. A planter on its own is a nice object and a slightly confusing present, because the recipient now has homework. Put something living in it before you wrap it, even a $4 grocery-store succulent. If you’d rather it arrive that way, we’ll add a live air plant to any planter for $5 at checkout, and it turns up sitting in the pot where it belongs instead of in a bag beside it.
Picks, sorted by who you’re buying for
For the one with a vegetable garden and a personality. The middle finger trellis is $6, stands about a foot from base to tip, and gives a small climbing plant something to hold onto. It is the single most gifted thing we make and roughly a third of the orders come with a note asking us to not put the price on the packing slip, which we don’t do on anything, ever.
For the aunt whose house is already full. She doesn’t need another object on a surface. She needs a hook. The hanging sloth planter is $10, comes with its string, and takes a trailing plant off the shelf and into the air where there’s still room. He hangs upside down by his arms looking deeply unbothered, which is the correct energy for late December.
For the coworker who waters everyone else’s desk plants. This person has never once been thanked, and it is time somebody gave a hoot. The owl planter is $11 and about 4 inches, which fits the standard nursery pot a grocery-store succulent comes in with no repotting required, so the whole gift can be assembled in the parking lot of a grocery store if it comes to that.
For your brother-in-law, who is hard to read. The boot planter, $12, 6 by 6 by 4 inches. It reads as garden decor to a garden person and as a weird little sculpture to everybody else, so it clears the bar either way.
For the teenager starting their first plant. The moon planter, $11, in whatever color they’d pick for a phone case. We print in 14 colors and the choice matters more to a sixteen-year-old than it does to you.
For the friend who is very online about the ocean. The octopus planter is $11, about 5 inches across and 4 deep, and has eight arms and no interest in your opinion. The one on my desk has survived three repottings.
Three of them is the sweet spot
Not because we want you to buy three. Because one small planter alone under a tree looks like an afterthought, and three of them in a row looks like you thought about it. Any three of ours come to $33 as the Shelf Squad bundle, and it applies itself in the cart, so there’s no code to remember at 11:40pm on a Thursday.
It also solves the break-room problem. Anybody running a Secret Santa with a $12 ceiling and five people to cover can do three pots in three colors in one order. Everything gift-shaped lives on the gifts page if you’d rather browse than read.
What we’d skip
Seed-starting kits with a printed cardboard sleeve. Every gardener has three in a closet and has planted none of them, because a gardener already has seeds and a preferred method and a strong opinion about peat pellets.
Engraved hand tools. They’re beautiful. They go in a drawer and never see dirt, which for a tool is a kind of insult.
And anything described as a terrarium that’s a sealed glass ball with a plant in it and no way to get your hand inside. We have watched a lot of those arrive at plant shows in January looking like a science-fair project gone quiet.
One logistics note, because December is December
Everything we sell is printed after you order it. A pot takes about 4 hours on the machine, and orders ship in 2 business days, which holds right up until the week where the whole internet remembers Christmas at once. Order by mid-December and you’re comfortable. Order on the 22nd and you’re gambling, and we’d rather tell you that now than apologize later.
If the person on your list is less gardener and more windowsill-collector, the under-$20 picks live in our guide to gifts for plant lovers. And if they just moved, a plant already in its pot beats a candle by a distance we’ve made the case for elsewhere.