Where to Buy Landscaping Materials in Little Rock
Where to buy landscaping materials in Little Rock is a common question when you finally reach the point in a home project where all the dreaming, researching, and planning turns into the ever-important shopping list. Once you know what you need, the next step is finding the right place to buy your materials.
If you’re searching for landscape materials near you, visiting a local independent garden center can make all the difference when choosing the right plants, soil, stone, and mulch for your project. In fact, local garden centers are often the best places to buy landscaping materials in Little Rock because they offer a wide selection of plants, soil, mulch, and bulk stone for landscaping projects.
Landscaping Supplies
Softscape Materials
These include the soil, plants, and mulch for a landscape project. When you visit, you’ll find our plants separated by sun requirements to make selection easier. We have all our bulk items (loose and sold by the cubic yard) such as soils and mulch located near each other to make comparison easier. We offer an even wider range of mulches and soils in bags; check these out if you aren’t seeing what you like available in bulk.
If you’re planning a new landscape and deciding what to plant, our guide to best plants for landscaping explains how to select trees, shrubs, and colorful accent plants for your space.
Hardscape Materials
As you might expect, hardscape landscape materials include the less pliable items… loose stones, boulders, edging, weed fabric, all those things. Mulch like bulk soil and mulch, we sell a variety of stones (pea gravel, river rock, oversize river rock, C-ballast, SB-2 and screenings, aka chat) by the cubic yard, and we also have the basics available in bags. Here is the Mulch, Soil and Stone link again; it’s helpful to see if we have what you are looking for!
In our Rock Yard, located on the western edge of Good Earth, we have pallets of edging stone, Ozark stacking stone (for low retaining walls or edging), Ozark step stones and of course flagstone. These are all sold by pound, in full or half pallets. More information about how these stones can be used is below.
Why Buy Landscape Materials From a Local Garden Center?
For landscaping materials, we suggest starting at your local garden center when selecting the best materials for landscaping, and here’s why:
Knowledge
Good garden centers spend time investing in their team, making sure they are familiar with all the offerings from soils to mulches, from stone to chemicals, from shrubs to annuals! If they are like Good Earth, they also focus on applying what they learn to their buying decisions.
In a nutshell, we know that if we sell you a plant that doesn’t do well in our area, chances are, you won’t have success, which means we won’t either! That is why a thoughtful plant selection for landscaping is what leads to landscapes that actually thrive, not just look good on planting day.
Diverse Inventory
Sourcing a few plants here and there is easier than finding all the important building blocks of a landscape. Think bulk soil and stone, nice containers, and big specimen trees, all key landscaping materials for larger projects. These can be hard to find at box stores.
Year-Round Availability
Full service, independent garden centers have seasonal items, but most of the inventory is available year-round, particularly if they have their own landscape department like Good Earth does.
We’re stocked year-round with exceptional landscape materials because we use them ourselves.
Quality
We hinted on this already, but quality is where it’s at! Landscaping is an investment, and choosing the healthiest plants available is smart. Once you have been gardening for a while, sure, scope out plant clearances for new challenges!
For the same reason as availability, independent garden centers excel at stocking quality plants. Good Earth is able to buy truckloads of trees from high-end sources because we need them not only for the store but for our landscaping projects. That means customers can plan with confidence, choosing from landscape trees, ornamental landscape trees, and shrubs for landscaping that are proven to perform well.
Best Time to Buy Landscape Materials
Any time! Garden centers like Good Earth stay stocked year-round but some plants are seasonal. For example, there are warm season annuals and cool season annuals; stocked during their season only. No matter the season, we’re ready with plants for landscaping that are suited to our climate and conditions.
For plants that bloom only once a year, we have our best selection before they bloom and during the bloom time, since that is when they are being shopped. We rotate shrubs around based on what you could call the plant’s high season, which helps when planning landscape plant design!
The same goes for bulbs like tulips or perennials like Lenten rose that prefer the cool winter weather. We grow our own perennials, with our best selection available during spring and early summer. Our perennial department will always have options but if you are landscaping in January, we suggest coming back in April for a wider variety, picking them at the same time you would pick up your warm season annuals.
Trees are planted most commonly in spring and fall. We tend to have less in the summer and winter, but we stay so full enough that it is rarely noticeable! Balled and burlapped plants are field grown then dug and wrapped in burlap. Horticulturally, it’s not good for the plants to do this at extremely high or low temperatures… or when the soil is too saturated for equipment to function, which means there are times we are low on those too. Most items we have in B&B, as it is called, are also available in containers more readily.
Realistically, people tend to think more about landscaping projects when the weather is nice. If you want to do the work during the spring or fall season, you might want to start planning during the winter.
The Good Earth Landscape Team
We plan and install landscapes all year round. One of the first steps when considering a landscape project is whether you will be doing the installation or if you would rather someone else handle it. There isn’t a wrong answer, unless you have grading or drainage issues that will be tricky to do effectively without professional help. Part of your decision-making process may also be considering how patient you are.
For example, if you want a big green screen for privacy and not up for planting smaller materials and letting them grow, large plant materials are the way to go. And properly planting large materials can be challenging without a lot of help and perhaps even equipment.
Our Landscape Team is full service; we do it all from full landscape renovations to planning a timeless landscape for a newly constructed home. The Good Earth isn’t just planting plants; we design and install sprinkler systems, outdoor lighting, hardscapes and water features. We invite you to check and learn more about us!