Spring 2008. And now for the seasonal comment. We have added many new items to the Full Catalogue for 2008. In fact some rather interesting new items were just added January, 2008! By the end of the month, we will have added close to 200 plants. There are even new Coleus and Begonias! We are working on our Houseplant offerings now for your Spring and Summer growing! We have started taking orders now for Spring delivery. When you order let us know if you want your order for your spring garden or for you houseplant collection. If it is a group of plants for your home, we will ship as soon as the weather permits and the plants are ready. Coleus and other Garden plants will usually start to ship in mid April and later. Let us know if you have a greenhouse or plant room so we can plant when to ship. We are looking forward to the 2008 planting season. Welcome back!!!! Check out the New Plants for 2008 . Things keep changing as the seasons go by! It is now the first of January 2008. We still are propagating Coleus. Check them out Here. If you are in a hurry and want to get a quick shipment of coleus, try our coleus collections. And we will be concentrating on houseplants and perrenial orders heavily for the first part of the year. But unlike other years, we have done shipping when 1) the plants are ready and 2) the weather permits. These orders have been primarily for houseplant types. We have increased the amount of pottery and supplies in the new showrooms this year immensely. There are also several relatively "New" features to our Website (they have the icon designation.) Be sure to view the Virtual Tour of the Gardens and greenhouses. This has just redone to include pictures from the 2006 and 2008 summer season. This will take you from the front entry way through the various garden rooms with a final look at some of our tropicals. Next, we have just included some views of a beautiful Victorian Garden featuring coleus and other exotic tropicals used as summertime bedding plants. Check out our Victorian Garden link. We have some very beautiful photos in this section from the gardens or Charles Downer and recently Sue Novello This is an old section with pictures from several years back and we have just added some recent photos to it. . And finally, we have added some new plants to the Variegated Plant Gallery. Click Here to travel to the world of Variegated Plants. This Variegated plant listing has been revised and now includes almost 400 items. Enjoy.

We continue to revise the whole online catalogue this 2008 (and 2008) season. It keeps changing. We have basically remodelled the Perennial and Succulent Pages with lots of new additions for 2008. We have now inserted 25 more Begonias and 35 more Coleus in the Tropicals pages. So there is much to see online for 2008. During the summer months, orders often go out more quickly, because we have the outdoors to grow in too. Click here to go right to the main catalogue page! Our Everchanging Specialty List is now online for your perusal Click Here to go directly to some of the new listings for the Spring 2008 season. For many of you the catalogue listings alone will be an eye opening adventure, but we have some super unusual items in our new Specialty List! Take a look.We have just amplified our new department, Garden Art and Gift Items. We have just renamed our website, Glasshouse Works, "Items for Home, Garden and Conservatory." The old logo was "Plants Traditional and Unusual." Both of these logos still apply! With the addition of the domain name, www.fantasticgardens.com, you will also note that we refer to our site as "The Fantastic Gardens of the Glasshouse Works." Nothing egotistical about that! We have just expanded.

"Family Circle" (November 2008) magazine just mentioned us in an article on Ferns and dwarf plants. Martha Stewart's "Cookie" Magazine (for November 2008) also gave us a nod in an article on Terrariums! We are thrilled to have been featured in the January "House and Garden" magazine for our distinctive tropical introductions and reintroductions of worthy older houseplant types. Take a look at the January Issue. Also, "Fine Gardening" has listed us as a source for our Geranium Collections.Take a look at "Martha Stewart Living" this spring for nods to our distinctive plants listings also. We are not listed directly in February's issue, but the article on ferns in "Martha Stewart Living" includes a lot of ferns that we offer and shows one of the terrariums we offer. The recentissue of Martha Stewart lists us as a source of fine begonis. December 2006 saw an article in the New York Times as Well as the Courier Journal featuering our Begonias again! Last August, we were listed as the source for Terrarium plants in "House and Garden." The plants in the pictures of this issue were from Glasshouse Works too! We might venture to say that Begonias ended up beging the "Plant of the Year" almost during the latter part of 2006. We also have stocked up on Terrarium Plants because there is such an interest in them and miniature gardening. The Glasshouse Works is very much in the flow of the plant interest this year. It is now the beginning of the shipping season for 2008 and we are pleased to announce that we have been able to obtain the domain name of "www.FantasticGardens.com." This added to the domain you know us by for the last eight years of "www.RarePlants.com" and "www.FinePlants.com" as well as the recently acquired "ExoticPlants.com"completes the foursome of names that denote what we represent to you, our customer, the plant enthusiast. We are pleased that you can search for us by these names that relay the meaning our our business and gardens, our exotic plants and flowers! You can email us at "info@exoticplants.com" or "info@rareplants.com" We hope to hear from you.

Big news for all of those who have been Emailing us and wondering when we would be making some changes to the Website. The Website has just again been redesigned and updated for the 2008 shipping season. For some of our customers who have slow connection speeds, we continue to have an alternate version with fewer graphics so that the pages download much faster than our regular version. As of February 1, this text version will have all the new items for 2008 just as the main version does. We have set this up so that if you are browsing with image intensive version you can click just under the Flash Image at the top of the page to go to the non-graphic version. At the top of the page on this faster downloading version you can in turn click to return to the same page with more images. You won't miss a thing on either versions. You can also make the decision about which online pages to view on the Welcome page; just click where it says "Connection Slow? Click Here." You can switch back and forth whenever you want. Those with DSL or Cable do not need to worry.

We have our new Garden Arts Gallery with offering many garden objects and links to many artists studios and other home and garden supplies. We offer a new Studio, our Fine Arts Gallery which showcases local and international artists. These pages are both accessible from our welcome page. When you are browsing the Garden Arts Gallerys you will see at the bottom of each page a box of 24 images with links to special special interest Galleries. Some of these might warrant special comment here. We have our new growing page of supplies Garden Accessories like bonsai pots, fertilizer and soils. We have a new page of Garden Statuary. We are working in conjunction with Estate Lions to offer some fine Chinese statuary. You can view our offerings at Our Chinese Art Page. We also have links to original metal forged garden art at the Garden Forge. The Garden Forge page has just been amplified because of demand. Or perhaps you might want to visit the Dewey Studios for her famous cat images. The Dewey Studios have a new MiniCat offering and we now offer most of their wonder designs. Check it out! The Home and Garden Page has links to all the various galleries that we offer. From this page you can link to many individual galleries, including a new Ceramic Gallery which includes some wonder new imported Chinese dragons as well as many of our Mexican imports.

And the best news so far, due to so many requests, is the new Coleus Photo Gallery! It is now uploaded and functioning. It has been completely redesigned for 2008 with a new gallery format. It now lists close to 275 individual images of Coleus past, present and future. It is not an availability listing but a listing of the wide diversity of coleus plants that are available out there! Click here to go directly to it!The Gallery is composed to Thumbnails so that you can download it fairly quickly. Then each of the Thumbnails has an associated larger pictures which you can see by clicking on the Thumbnail. In addition to this, each of the Coleus in the catalogue listings has these same Thumbnail images to help in your ordering process. Click here to go the the Catalogue Listings of Coleus We have some new intros and new photos of NEW COLEUS, new ones for 2008 even, believe it or not. So later this month check this site out for even more coleus introductions. In addition to this, we have teamed up with the Ecke Plant Ranch and the "Flower Fields" line of plants for the "Stained Glassworks" series of coleus introductions. You can get to our new pages for information on the coleus that you can purchase nationally by going to our new Stainedglass Works website! This page lists information on the "Flower Fields" introductions and the "Stained Glassworks" series. You can get back to the main Glasshouse Works easily from this website location. And you can get to the new Coleus Gallery from this website too.

There are various services now available on the Net that link to Gardening sources of all kinds. The Garden Links pages are new; we list them here in case you want to bookmark them for future use. Click Here to go to our Links Page. We just uploaded a page for those of you bothered by deer, Links to what to do about deer visiting your garden. We have a wonderful Search Page for those of you needing to find if a plant or items is mentioned anywhere on our website. We are working to improve this search and hope to have it more specific soon. We have a Common Name Pages where you can scroll down and locate the common name of the plant you want and find its scientific name which you can then check to see if we offer it! Lot of new things this year.

We have been adding some garden statuary and planting even more rare and distinctive plants in our display gardens. We think that you will enjoy a visit to our gardens this coming Summer and Fall. In fact, we have given several bus tours and had visitors from all over the globe. It is hard to keep the avid gardener down!! We have added some wonderful Chinese statuary. Most recent is a set of large red sunset marble Foo Dogs which oversee all the activities of the gardens! We also have Hercules at the entry to the garden. We have added a sundial on an ancient looking podium. Recently we installed a set of the four seasons statues, representing the seasons of the year. We are working to get two Mill Stones integrated into the designs. We have a stack of Circle Design brick to create some new pathways. Although this project is not finished yet, some of the circle brick has been installed and the design is looking good. . But we have added a pair of statuary Griffins to help guard the plants. We also have some gorgeous urns (not planted yet though). We also just installeda large fountain with water flowering gently over stone grapes. Looks rather Italianate. We now have the new statuary in stock in the garden, including a great angel, a Pan, a Dragon, and some cranes. By far the most popular of our ornaments for the yard continues to be our pond hippo (named Splash) which everyone young and old has to pet as they walk by as though it were really alive! We have recently added two wonderful granite elephants and a group of granite benches which are gradually being engraved by Richard Dickerson, our resident artist. You can look at a lot of his work in particular by going to his Granite Art Pages by clicking at the immediate left. We will be adding more statuary next year and enlarging out offerings of Garden Statuary for you, our customer. Come see.

The most recent printed catalog we have is the 2001 catalog. If you are reading these comments, then you can view our Online Catalogue and that is now our major emphasis. We will included numerous website addresses of where to find the rarer plants that you might want. If you want to be on our printed mailing list and did not receive your catalogue yet, let us know. Please visit our Website from time to time and bookmark it. Things are changing constantly on the website. We hope to see you at the greenhouses when you are in the area. Our Walk-In Sales area and nursery area will offer numerous distinctive perennials, unusual Asian herbs, grafted needled conifers, larger aquatics and decorative hanging baskets--categories we are unable to offer by mail order, but popular with our visiting colectors If you are travelling this summer and fall, be sure to drop by the gardens. We are open Fridays and Saturdays. We will be maintaining our new Walk-In Sales House during the winter months as well as the new Showroom. So you can come at any month during the year to pick our your houseplants and your home and garden art. We now have a Search Engine for the Website (which can be found near the Navigation Bar on various of our pages. We include it here for you convenience if you are interesting in looking for a particular plant.