Let’s Check Out a New-to-Me Nursery!

While I’ve been on winter holiday break from school, my mother-in-law Gini wanted to go down to Dallas to find the fabric district. We did find several shops and there are more to go visit over off Harry Hines Boulevard, if you know the area. Later in the afternoon, though, after lunch and before heading home, we drove around seeing parts of Dallas and finally found Ruibal’s Plants of Texas.

Ruibal’s Plants of Texas – 7219 E. Grand
Dallas, TX 75214

I really loved their family shop atmosphere! Ruibals has several locations throughout the DFW area and I hope to check out several others as time allows. They had a good selection of pots and wire planters (like you would find coming up from Mexico), a small selection of statuary, and so much cabbage! I asked about the two fountains they had on-hand and if they had more. The manager said to check back in mid-March, which I will do!

From our final year in our last California home, this was the water fountain I had to leave behind. There just was no where to store it in either of the two storage units we had. ~ Spring Tea for One in the Garden.

I didn’t think to take a bunch of photographs, as Gini and I were just having fun looking around, but in summer they carry a lot more plants than shown here in my photographs.

A summertime photo ~ Courtesy Ruibal’s website

The cabbages were beautiful, large and small! I already had six smaller purple and green ornamental cabbages at home in the front planters, so I didn’t think I needed any more.

I loved that Ruibal’s had these incredible brick pathways loaded with flats of purple and white sweet alyssum (upper left above), flats of multi-colored pansies and other annuals which grow well around Dallas during the winter.

Dallas, I believe, is growing zone 8b and is a good 10 degrees warmer on average than our lowest temps up in Denton, Texas. It was really nice and warm at this particular location.

I wish we had had time to go over to the Rosemead location as this looks like their flagship store. The Farmer’s Market location also looks promising!

Courtesy of **Ruibal’s Rosemead** ~ 3646 Rosemeade Pkwy
Dallas, TX 75287

I thought about grabbing a flat of mixed sweet alyssum but decided to wait until after February. I just know a killer freeze is still bound to come and I don’t know the lowest temps alyssum can handle. I had no alyssum come back from 2022 into last year. I do have some seeds which I picked up this week to sprinkle around the garden as soon as we are out of deep freeze danger (around March 1st).

I did find a lot of boxwood and small hollies available which do well all over North Texas in the winter and during the summer. Boxwood likes a bit of shade to keep it from scorching during the super heat of late July, August and sometimes September.

I just saw that Better Boxwood is becoming available here in the USA in 2024. These are the boxwood which are resistant to boxwood blight, the blight which has been killing beautiful hundred year old boxwood topiaries and hedges across Great Britain and Europe. Some boxwood cultivars do better than others.

The boxwood ball in the background is the one which gets nailed with mites… I’ll be cutting off the dead stuff here as we get out of winter. Looks great here!

For me, ours have trouble with pest, specifically mites. I get an organic Neem oil-based spray to spray on our boxwood and other plants troubled by mites (pretty common here in Texas).

Prices are really good for flats of plants ($21.00 for 18 plants). And they had large hellebore plants for $24.99 each. For some reason, I was given a 10% discount, which was really nice!

And that’s our trip to Ruibal’s! I am so glad I found this nursery. Can’t wait to see their other locations and what all they have there. 😉

Happy gardening hugs,