Free guide for Vancouver homes

Keep a big plant alive through a Vancouver winter, without guessing.

There is a reason the care advice you found online does not hold up on this coast, and it has nothing to do with your hands. This is the free guide we wrote for Vancouver homes, and it comes with a voucher for free repotting when you choose a pot in our Kitsilano shop.

Why a December here changes what your plant needs before anything else does
The repotting step that almost everyone gets backwards
What a yellow leaf usually means in this climate, and what a brown one means

Where should we send it?

Tap send and the download button, your repotting voucher and your 15 percent code appear on the very next screen. A copy also goes to your email.

Every email comes from Darrell at DH Garden Centre, 3742 West 10th Ave, Vancouver, BC V6R 2G4. This guide plus occasional gardening tips, never shared or sold, unsubscribe in one click.

A large plant in a white ribbed glazed pot on the shop floor at DH Garden Centre in Kitsilano

Sound familiar

Four things we hear at the counter every autumn

You paid real money for a mature plant, and eight months later you are looking at four leaves and a bare stem.

You followed the video exactly, the edges still went brown, and now you hesitate before buying anything large again.

It is the third grey week of November, you are inside for the evening, and there is nothing living in the room with you.

The plant itself is lovely, and the black plastic grower pot it came in is still sitting there in the corner of the living room.

It was never your hands

Almost every care guide online is written for somewhere sunnier and drier than here

8 hours 11 minutes
At the December solstice that is all the daylight Vancouver gets, and on an average December day only about 2 hours of real sunshine gets through the cloud. The sun sits about 17 degrees above the horizon. A plant sitting in that kind of light slows right down for months at a time, and there is nothing wrong with it.

Less light, far less water
When a plant can barely use the light, it drinks far less. So the soil under it stays wet for weeks on a watering habit that made perfect sense in July. The leaf signals get read backwards here too. A yellow leaf usually means the pot went bone dry and then got flooded, while the real overwatering signal is brown. So people tend to water more at the very moment they should be evening things out.

Freeze, thaw, repeat
The pots get caught by the same climate. What splits an outdoor pot in Vancouver is our endless freeze and thaw rather than deep cold, because water seeps into porous low fired clay and then expands about nine percent every time it freezes overnight and thaws by the afternoon. A whole set of advice about crusty mineral build up and filtered water does not apply here either. Vancouver tap water is soft, low in minerals and has no fluoride in it.

So if you have been quietly blaming yourself, this guide will probably read like a relief. Nearly all of it comes down to a climate the advice never accounted for.

Darrell checking a plant inside DH Garden Centre in Kitsilano

A note from Darrell

I have killed plants too

I am Darrell, and I have been growing plants in Vancouver for more than 25 years. I have killed plants, and some of them were not cheap ones. After enough of that I stopped guessing. I read everything I could find, and I tested one change at a time to see what actually held up through a wet winter here, rather than what worked in a book written somewhere else. What I ended up with is a small set of habits that hold on this coast, and that is the whole of this guide. I wrote it down so you can skip the part I already paid for, and get to the part where the plant is just a good thing in your house that you no longer worry about.

Darrell, DH Garden Centre, West 10th Avenue

Inside the guide

What you get in the guide

Why growing here is a different job, with the daylight and sunshine numbers that explain it
How to repot calmly, including the one step almost everyone gets backwards
How to choose a pot by size, drainage and material, so it fits the plant instead of fighting it
How to match the soil to the plant you actually own, instead of one bag for everything
How to water by reading the soil rather than the calendar, and where to put a plant in a room that faces the wrong way
When to bring tender plants indoors here, and why some pots split outdoors and others shrug it off
How to group and scale pots so a corner reads as designed rather than as an afterthought
How to read yellow, brown, drooping, soil flies and fine webbing early, plus a one page cheat sheet you can keep on your phone

Send me the guide

Free guide · Kitsilano, Vancouver

The Vancouver Plant Care & Repotting Guide

The honest little handbook for keeping your plants alive in Vancouver, from the family who flies to Vietnam to choose their ceramic pots by hand.

Why Vancouver is different
Repotting, without the fear
Choosing the right pot
The right soil for your plant
Daily care: water and light
Quick care cards
Through a Vancouver winter
Styling pots in a small space
Quick troubleshooting
Your one page cheat sheet

See it done

Watch a repot happen at our bench

Darrell repots a ZZ at the counter: the root ball stays in one piece, and the new pot goes wider rather than deeper.

Choosing the pot: going up only a size or two, and why a much bigger pot is not a kinder one.

Darrell answers the question we hear most at the counter: what actually matters when you pick a pot.

The pot finishes the room

A large plant behaves like a piece of furniture

It has a footprint, a height, a shape against the wall. The container it stands in is doing just as much work in that room as the leaves are. A tall plant in a black plastic grower pot reads as unfinished no matter how good the plant is, and the same plant in a heavy glazed ceramic reads as something that was chosen.

Our family flies to Vietnam and picks the pottery by hand. We go through the workshops province by province, in a country where these glazes have been made the same way for generations. That is why the shapes and the finishes here are not the ones sitting in every other shop in town.

There is a wall of pots in the shop and two rooms of them, in the sizes that suit a mature plant rather than a windowsill. Come and hold a few, and stand them next to each other in the light. People notice a well set corner the moment they walk into a home, and they almost never work out why. It is usually the pot.

A tall fiddle leaf fig in a two tone glazed ceramic pot with a blue saucer on the shop floor at DH Garden Centre

Shelves of glazed and terracotta pots at DH Garden Centre in Kitsilano

Darrell visiting a plant nursery in Vietnam

Your voucher

Free repotting with your pot

Choose a pot in our Kitsilano shop and the repotting is on us, done by hand at our bench.
Soil is included, up to 5 litres. If your planter needs more than that, we only add the cost of the extra soil.
Your repotting voucher does not expire. Come in when the plant is ready, this month or in the new year.
Bring in as many pots as you like. Each one gets repotted at the bench with the same care.

Real Google reviews

What people say after a visit

★★★★★

"Friendly and helpful service, had exactly what I was looking for. Superb selection of planting containers, and generally a wide array of gardening goods. So excited to come back."

Matt Taylor, Google review, Local Guide

★★★★★

"Great quality plants... Tons of beautiful pots some very large planters... Unique selection mostly imported from artisans in Vietnam."

Rachelle Hodgson, Google review

★★★★★

"Awesome little store with lovely staff and an especially good selection of beautiful pots..."

Cooper Hart, Google review

Good to know

Questions, answered

What exactly turns up in my inbox?

The Vancouver Plant Care and Repotting Guide as a file you can keep, and your free repotting voucher, both in the same email, usually within a minute. You also see the download button and your code on the screen right after you send the form.

How does the free repotting work?

Come into the shop with the plant you want sorted, choose a pot, and show us the voucher. We repot it at the bench in the right soil for that plant. Soil is included up to 5 litres, and past that we only add the cost of the extra soil. The voucher does not expire, and there is no limit on how many plants you bring in.

Will these pots come through a Vancouver winter?

Ours are high fired ceramic, which handles our freeze and thaw swings far better than porous low fired clay does. Tell us the pot is going outdoors and we will point you at the right ones and show you how to raise it off the ground so the drainage hole never sits in ice.

I have a large plant and no idea which pot suits it. Can you help?

That is the part we like. Tell Darrell about the plant, the room and how much light it gets, and he will walk you through size, drainage and soil. Pots are almost impossible to judge on a screen, so it is worth doing in person.

Where are you, and can I just come in?

Yes. We are at 3742 West 10th Avenue in Kitsilano, and you do not need to book anything to browse.

Get the guide and your repotting voucher

Takes ten seconds. The download button, your voucher and your 15 percent code appear on the next screen, and a copy goes to your email.

Every email comes from Darrell at DH Garden Centre. You will get this guide plus occasional gardening tips, never shared and never sold, and you can unsubscribe in one click from any email.