During this off-season we encourage you to make use of our website which is full of all of the resources you need to gain the knowledge, confidence, and inspiration that both beginning and veteran gardeners need to succeed at building healthy, vibrant, living landscapes at home and in communities.
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.
Drop in shopping at the Emporium typically runs from late April - mid October. Great new plants arrive every single week from April - September with peak native plant availability from late May through mid-September. In addition to the drop in shopping opportunities that we offer to local DIY home gardeners, we work with landscape professionals, conservation groups, municipalities, schools, non-profit community groups and more to help them secure the plants they need to make their ecological gardening projects a success. Outreach to discuss the ways we can help you meet and exceed your planting project goals! Pick up for special orders can be accommodated most days and times during the week.
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 list provided below will give you a sense of the wide variety of offerings available. Trays of single species 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 committed to environmental stewardship in their growing practices including integrated pest management techniques that minimize the use of 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. Many of the plants that we carry are grown from local ecotype seeds from EcoRegion 59 (Northeastern Coastal Zone) and EcoRegion 84 (Atlantic Pine Barrens).
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. 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 this website, our 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:
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This year we are offering you a peat free soil option for your containers, baskets and gardens! Click on the image above to learn more about Organic Mechanics soils and why we support this brand!