Southwest Gardener

I love to come to this cute shop right next to my favorite bookstore — Changing Hands! They have great advice for raising plants in AZ, and also I can find unique gifts for friends and family.

This is a wonderful local shop! I used to live in Phoenix and am back several times a year to visit family and always make a stop at Southwest Gardener. They have beautiful garden art, as well as a lovely selection of smaller items for home and outdoors (great for gifts). Their new location on Camelback Rd. is gorgeous, and close to the light rail and bike share stations. Customer service is always great — the owners and employees are super knowledgeable about all things gardening-​related, and if they don’t carry a particular product they can always refer you to another business that does.
Two thumbs up for Southwest Gardener!

We can’t stop in to Southwest Gardener without discovering something completely new and loveeeeeeeeee their new location! What’s not to like? There seems to be oodles more room for even more delightfully artistic goodies… some for the garden and some for the home. Our house has been touched by a number of handcrafted pieces we found at this unique and special store. Then when we need the most perfect gift, one of the two women owners, Amy or Lynn, are always right there with the perfect suggestions and wrapping. Finally… when they have a sale (we watch for them) THEY HAVE A GREAT SALE! That’s when we really stock up on gift items. This is such a cool place that we make a point to take our out of town guests on a field trip to Southwest Gardener. Now that they are in the Newton with Changing Hands Bookstore (another fave of ours) and Southern Rail (absolutely yummy) we couldn’t be happier!

This is a gorgeous and adorable store, though it’s more about the idea of being a gardener than about actual plants as such. They carry heirloom seeds and some bags of organic potting soil and soil improvers, but the vast majority of the store is given over to garden-​related tchotchkes, so it’s not an urban substitute for going to a big locally owned nursery.
That said, if you want garden-​related tchotchkes, this is hog heaven. It’s all beautiful, clever, shiny, affirming, thoughtful, and ready to impress the readers of your lifestyle blog. Your credit card will leap out of your pocket and prostrate itself before the «construct your own affirming flag string» flags (cleverly retro!), the tiny placards for hipster saints (including one for bicycling), the many forms of colored glass, the little air plants suspended over flasks that look like labware, the many colorful things you could use to hold a party on your patio… also, there are books on how to make your garden exciting enough that it will be worthy of all these marvelous things.
I vaguely recall this store being at Thomas and 15^th Avenue (not street, per the disappointed reviewer), where it was equally full of lovely things but more risky to walk around.
If you want gifts for your avid-​gardener friends — or you have some spare cash to reward yourself for getting the dull tasks like weeding done — this store is full of sparkly, sparkly win.