Compliment or insult?

If someone tells you your garden looks like a nursery, is that an insult or complement?

Choose one and tell me why.

I say it's a compliment! To me it means you have a lot of very healthy, gorgeous plants! I can browse nurseries for hours.

It is accurate. Plants are being propagated and grown to full size in my patio garden. Most of them will end up in the ground elsewhere or passed along to others.

Thanks for your replies ... I was hoping to get a few more responses. The reason I asked is because a good friend of mine was gravely insulted when a neighbor told her her garden looked like a nursery. This was over a year ago and it still bothers her a great deal - she can't let it go. I asked if she ever considered that maybe your neighbor was giving you a compliment .. which is what I would take it as. I started this thread in hopes that it would let her see that she probably had the wrong impression and what her neighbor said was not an insult but a compliment.

It would be a compliment for me too. Nurseries are eye candy to me.

Looking like a nursery is a good thing!

That is a strange thing to say. I wonder If she meant as a compliment. I would not care it was a compliment or and insult because I garden for me and do not really care what the neighbors think.

But.......I think home gardens are ugly and do look like a nursery when they have plant names sticking up in front of every plant.

I'm not a big fan of the name tags either. If I can't remember a name, I might write it on the side of the pot, but the usual plastic tags strike me as an undesirable aesthetic interruption of my ornamental plants. Having to remember the name is actually a good exercise for me mentally. When I pass plants along I usually do a tag with the vital info, but I stick it on the side of the pot out of the way.

@Baja_Costero I have over a hundred Hostas and a lot of bushes, perennials. I know the names of everyone of them. I agree work your brain like you work your body. Don't use it you will lose it.

I paid money for them and I remember handing over that credit card for them. I do not need a name tag to remember the names. I will forget what I paid but I know it cost money.

What came to mind when I read the question is that maybe there are a lot of pots? When I think of what a nursery looks like, it's a horde of potted plants. It could have been intended as insult or compliment. Without much more context or knowing the person who said it, it's impossible to say which was the intention.

Yes, maybe somebody had a bad experience in a nursery, and that ended up wrapped up with the concept/word itself. Or maybe there's some stigma attached to nurseries being places for baby plants, as opposed to mature garden plants? I find nurseries fascinating places, personally.

Same here. I love them and seek them out wherever I travel. I do the same with Botanical Gardens.

@Xeramtheum I also find it to be a very odd way to describe someone's gardens! Personally, I would take it as a compliment, because, as mentioned above, nursery plants are healthy and lush!

But, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so perhaps it was a compliment, or perhaps not! As mentioned above, it may have been described that way because your friend has a great deal of pots, but I'm going to take that a step further. There are decorative pots that are black, right? So, perhaps your friend has a large collection of decorative black pots? .....and/or their plants, whether potted or in the ground, are lined up like soldiers, just as they are displayed at nurseries?

I hope your friend is able to get past this, and be happy with how THEY view their own gardens, because that's most important to their own inner peace!!

My friend has pretty much 90% of her plants in the ground .. the other 10% are in pots but they are not black pots .. all of the decorative. I'm thinking perhaps that the comment was made because she has lots and lots of different plants and when you first see it, you don't know where to look first. She's trying real hard not to let it bother her but I know it still does.

The person who said that probably has no appreciation of gardens or plants. She should just take joy in her creation, and seek out others who are that way.

Use to teach some classes on design, I always said you design and plant the garden for yourself, not for the people in the cars driving by; a garden is anything you want it to be...if you want a garden of 100 pink plastic flamingos, than so be it.

Tell your friend to get a sign that says "honk if it's pretty" and after a few hours of raucous honking, she should feel better.

Great idea, Tiffany!

Lol .. I don't think her HOA would go for that!