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The Native Plant Emporium is located in Swansea, MA. Look for the Big Red Barn on Barneyville Road (literally) on the Barrington, RI/Swansea, MA town/state border. Use 6 Barneyville Road, Barrington, RI 02806 for GPS, but pull into the driveway at the red barn on the Swansea side of the state line, not the house on the Barrington side. If you use Google Maps our location will pop right up for you.
We officially open for "drop in shopping" on April 30, 2025 but are currently here taking orders for springtime projects. Reach out any time to discuss your needs. Drop in shopping at the Emporium runs from April 30th until late October (or until the plants run out and the weather turns, whichever comes first!). Please take note of our drop-in shopping hours:
Great new plants arrive every single week from April - September with peak native plant availability from late May through mid-September.
We accept cash, Venmo, PayPal, credit and debit cards. Thanks in advance for your patronage and interest in adding beneficial plants to your yards and gardens.
We are a hyper-local establishment with a huge variety of plants. We often have more than 350 varieties on hand at any time including rare, endangered and hard to find in the nursery trade plants. Our perennials, grasses, ferns, shrubs and small trees are stocked in robust sizes typically ranging from 1-7 gallon pots with a few smaller 3.5 inch and 1 quart perennials available. The plant lists provided below will give you a sense of the wide variety of offerings available. Trays of landscape plugs - both herbaceous perennials and shrub and tree tublings - are always available by special order, contact us to discuss options.
We do not use any pesticides here at our nursery and we only source plants from growers who are deeply committed to environmental stewardship in their growing practices including integrated pest management techniques that minimize the use of any chemical inputs. The plants that we sell are not artificially forced into bloom in heated greenhouses. Most of the perennials and shrubs are grown outdoors, following natural growing rhythms and our springtime flowering annuals are grown by an experienced grower who utilizes a complex hardening off process that creates far more cold tolerance and resiliency in the plants.
We are very committed to meeting the rapidly growing demand for great native plants and so as of 2024 we scaled back our own growing to focus our energies on working with very high quality specialty Northeast Growers who are able to supply us with a dazzling array of responsibly grown, extremely high quality, well rooted plants in the quantities we need to respond to your planting goals. These wholesale growers have decades of experience offering some of the very best products in the industry. Many of these plants are grown from eco-type seed from New England and nearby Long Island. We believe that making this switch is important not only to get more beneficial plant roots into the ground in our area but also to help to demonstrate to growers that there is in fact a strong market for straight species native plants, thus seeding much broader and longer-lasting change in the industry. This shift has allowed us to move from selling hundreds of plants each to year to getting tens of thousands of beneficial plants into yards across our region!
We are definitely not a traditional nursery. We are here on a mission to change gardening practices for the greater good and to offer support and community for others on a similar quest. We encourage you to use the educational resources we provide in the form of newsletters, newspaper articles, blog posts and more. We also hope you will attend one of the educational programs we offer in the community or here at the Emporium. Your support of our business helps us be able to offer programming and resources for the community. Visit the Upcoming Events page of our website to learn more.
A few additional notes:
At Prickly Ed’s Cactus Patch Native Plant Emporium we proudly stock the areas largest selection of straight species, northeastern, native, indigenous, plants! You will also find some plants not native to our immediate region, but well suited to broader ecological gardening goals. Explore our plant lists below.
Our inventory is constantly changing just like the New England Weather! You’ll find hundreds of varieties of plants including rare, unusual and seldom seen for sale offerings! We do not maintain or post a live online inventory. We are an old fashioned, hyperlocal, owner operated, roadside attraction where you shop live and in person and get to enjoy looking at wicked awesome plants and interacting with other wicked awesome people! The lists below represent the lineup of plants that will be in stock throughout the spring season (late April through the end of May) with many additional varieties becoming available as the season progresses. It’s not at all unusual for cool things not on the list to magically appear as well.
Native plants are grown outside following natural cycles and will not be available until they have fully broken dormancy and are clearly ready to grow into robust plants in your garden. It is impossible to pinpoint what that precise date might be. Just come by often to explore and see what you discover in the magical world outside the internet 🙂! If you are looking for a particular species or traveling from a distance please reach out ahead of time to confirm availability!
Black Gold for your gardens! The secret to great gardens is in the soil. We carry the one and only Earth Care Farms Organic Compost & Raised Bed Mix for your garden needs. For the best price and most environmentally friendly option, bring your own five gallon bucket and fill it up!
Try it! You’ll never go back to regular mulch.
Upcycled Materials - Amazing Price - Ready to Use!
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