Especially after days of surfing glitzy but vacuous web pages, Georgetown's homegrowntexas.com may have appealed to me because of its simplicity. I scrolled quickly through the offerings—a couple hundred herbs, perennials, bulbs, and roses—and spied a Mutabilis, an old-fashioned rose that I've been lusting after (it's frequently sold out at nurseries). Click, click, click and the one-gallon specimen was mine for $15. The delivery time was four to six weeks, or so I thought, until I received an e-mail notifying me that the company was out of Mutabilis until January; did I want something else? (They must have thought it was a Christmas present.) I said I'd wait. As of press time—late January—I was still waiting.

KUDOS Quite Texocentric; you can buy organic gardening books by Lone Star horticultural heroes like Howard Garrett, Malcolm Beck, Liz Druit, and Bill Welch.

GRIPES No information about the plants sold and no photos. Come educated or with a reference book in hand.

Our extended drought has withered my passion for potting and planting, but I felt something stir when I logged on to Austin's garden.com. The site is gloriously lush—and it should be, considering the, uh, nature of the product being sold. Here you can find thousands of plants, bulbs, and seeds, as well as books, tools, bird feeders, and even the odd greenhouse. I broke down after more than an hour and ordered a potted amaryllis for my sister-in-law, Renee, whose dog had died. Four days later the plant arrived at her home in Nevada, but the pot was broken. I explained the problem in an e-mail to "customer solutions" and promptly received an apology and word that another amaryllis would be shipped to Renee immediately.

KUDOS Content-rich, with eye-popping photos, extensive stats about thousands of plants, and advice for growers in different regions.

GRIPES Renee is still waiting for a new amaryllis. And the site is slow to load: In fact, according to an online study, it's one of the slowest, with a download time of 23.09 seconds. It's a good thing that gardeners are patient.