Where to Buy Plants in Fredericton: Nurseries, Garden Centres and Houseplant Hunting

The Lay of the Land: A Nursery Scene That Has Seen Some Things

If you gardened in Fredericton before 2010, you remember Green Village. The big Home and Garden operation was the default answer to “where do I buy plants” for a generation, and its closure in April 2010, which shuttered both the Fredericton and Moncton locations and put 55 people out of work, left a hole in the local scene that never got filled by a single successor. Instead, the business scattered into a handful of specialists, and honestly, the town is better served for it. You just need to know who does what.

One source of ongoing confusion worth clearing up: Greener Village, the community food centre on the north side, is not a garden centre. It picked up the similar name years after the retail operation closed, and while it does run community gardens, a teaching kitchen and gardening programs for food bank clients, you cannot buy a flat of petunias there. People mix them up constantly. Now you won’t.

What Fredericton has today is a short but sturdy roster. Scott’s Nursery in Lincoln is the full-service, year-round anchor and the closest thing to a destination garden centre in the capital region. Currie’s Greenhouses in Douglas covers the north side from spring to early fall. Wetmore’s handles sod, landscaping and nursery stock on Riverside Drive. The Co-op Country Store on St. Marys Street runs a proper seasonal garden centre, and the big boxes (Kent on both sides of the river, Canadian Tire, and friends) fill in the commodity end. For anything rare, hardy or grafted, Corn Hill Nursery is worth the drive southeast.

This guide covers all of them, plus where to get soil and compost by the yard, when to actually plant things in a zone 5 river valley, and where the free expert advice lives. If you are hunting for a plot to put those plants in, our guides hub has companion reading on gardening and community gardens in the city.

Scott’s Nursery: The Lincoln Institution

Scott’s Nursery at 2192 Route 102 in Lincoln is where most Fredericton plant money ends up, and it has earned that. The business goes back to 1929, when Scottish immigrant Oliver Scott started what was then a mixed farm; he and his wife Martha built their first greenhouse in 1935, and the family never really stopped building. Today the third generation runs roughly six acres of greenhouses about ten minutes from downtown along the river road toward Oromocto, heated since 2010 by a wood pellet system rather than oil, which is a genuinely rare bit of green infrastructure for a greenhouse operation this size.

The range is the widest in the area: annual bedding plants by the acre in spring, perennials, trees and shrubs, a proper year-round tropical and houseplant section, plus soils, seeds and seed-starting supplies when the rest of the city is still under snow. They grow a large share of their own stock on site rather than trucking everything in, which matters in a climate where a plant raised in an Ontario hoop house can sulk for a season after arriving here. The industry has noticed too; Scott’s took a national Garden Centres Canada award in 2018 and the Oromocto and Area Chamber of Commerce large business award in 2024.

Posted hours at the time of writing run Monday to Saturday, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., though spring hours tend to stretch, so check scottsnurseryonline.com or their Facebook page before making a special trip. They run online ordering with local delivery and pickup, which is handy in May when the parking lot resembles a small pilgrimage site.

A practical note on timing: the two weekends either side of Victoria Day are gloriously chaotic out there. If you want first pick of hanging baskets and the odd tomato varieties, go on a weekday morning in mid May. If you want markdowns, late June is your friend, and the plants are usually fine, just slightly less photogenic.

Currie’s Greenhouses: The North Side’s Spring Ritual

Currie’s Greenhouses on Route 105 in Douglas is the small, family-run counterweight to the Scott’s pilgrimage. The Currie family started growing in the Nashwaak area in 1984 and now runs more than 21,000 square feet of greenhouse space just past the city’s north edge. It is very much a working family operation, and it feels like one in the best way: annuals, perennials, hanging baskets and planters, herbs, and a strong line of vegetable transplants including tomato varieties chosen for actual purposes, like paste and salsa, rather than whatever the wholesale catalogue was pushing.

Two things set Currie’s apart. First, they keep bees, so you can leave with local honey along with your flats. Second, they grow cut flowers all summer, and their bouquets have a devoted following, some of them assembled by Andrew Currie’s mother, who was still helping at 86. That is the kind of quality control you cannot buy.

Currie’s is seasonal, open from early spring until early fall, with summer hours that have typically run 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily; call (506) 444-8109 or check their Facebook page before heading out in the shoulder months. If you cannot make it up Route 105, they come to you: Currie’s is a regular in the seasonal courtyard at the Boyce Farmers Market on Saturday mornings, selling bouquets, transplants and produce. The market is generally the easiest way to buy from several local growers in one pass, and you can make a morning of it; see our eat and drink section for the rest of the market game plan.

Corn Hill Nursery: The Road Trip for Serious Plants

Corn Hill Nursery is not in Fredericton, and it does not matter; every serious gardener here makes the trip anyway. Located at 2700 Route 890 in Cornhill, a little over an hour southeast toward Petitcodiac, it is the largest plant production nursery in Canada east of Montreal: 65 acres, close to a thousand varieties, and a four-decade reputation built by founder Bob Osborne, a published author, longtime CBC radio gardening columnist and one of the region’s genuine horticultural authorities.

The specialty is hardiness. Corn Hill grows its stock in the ground, in New Brunswick, without chemical herbicides or pesticides, feeding the soil with compost, mulch and crab and fish meal. A rose or apple tree that has survived a Cornhill winter will not be shocked by anything your Fredericton yard throws at it. The hardy rose selection is the best in the Maritimes, they graft their own cold-climate apple cultivars, and the nursery serves as one of only ten Canadian test sites for new rose introductions. If a plant is borderline for zone 5, this is where you find out honestly, because the staff would rather talk you out of a doomed purchase than sell it twice.

The retail nursery runs seasonally from April through October, and in season it has been open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.; confirm at cornhillnursery.com before you drive. Build in lunch: the on-site Cedar Café, added in 2000, does housemade soups, sandwiches and wood-fired pizza, and it turns a plant errand into one of the better casual day trips in southern New Brunswick. Go in June when the rose fields start, or in September when the crowds thin and the trees are cheaper.

One habit worth adopting from the regulars: bring a list of your dead plants. Telling the Corn Hill counter what died in your yard, and where, gets you better recommendations than any hardiness chart.

Everyday Options: The Co-op, Wetmore’s and the Big Boxes

For the unglamorous middle of gardening, the bags of soil, the seed racks, the replacement hose, Fredericton has solid workaday options. The Co-op Country Store at 317 St. Marys Street on the north side (the home and farm arm of the Fredericton Direct Charge Co-op, no membership required for this store) runs a seasonal garden centre from May 1 until, in their own words, the first snowfall. Expect flower baskets, annuals, perennials, shrubs and trees, alongside seed racks stocked from Maritime and Canadian houses like Halifax Seed, McKenzie and Ontario Seed Company, plus fertilizer, compost, tools and, somewhat unexpectedly, a full indoor-growing and hydroponics section. It is also the place for the farm-adjacent stuff no garden centre carries. Call (506) 458-9308 if you are hunting something specific.

Wetmore’s Landscaping, Sod and Nursery at 403 Riverside Drive is the name to know for lawns and landscape stock. They are first and foremost a sod and landscaping operation, but the nursery side carries trees and shrubs, and if your project involves grading, a new lawn or serious quantities of green material, they are the established local call at (506) 472-3357. They have been at it for decades and their sod is grown locally, which your lawn will appreciate more than anything shipped in on a flatbed.

The big boxes do what big boxes do. Kent Building Supplies runs seasonal garden centres at both stores, 809 Bishop Drive on the south side and 25 Two Nations Crossing on the north, with trees, shrubs, perennials and bulk commodity pricing on soil and mulch. Canadian Tire’s seasonal garden sections cover annuals, soil and hardware basics. Prices are keen and the early-season selection is fine; the trade-off is care, since a flat that has spent two weeks on a parking lot rack in full sun has lived a hard life. Shop the big boxes early in the delivery cycle, inspect roots, and treat the late-season clearance racks as a fun gamble rather than a plan.

The honest advice most local gardeners follow: buy your dirt and hardware wherever it is cheapest, and buy your plants from the people who grew them.

Houseplants: Where the Tropicals Actually Hide

Fredericton does not currently have a dedicated downtown houseplant boutique, and pretending otherwise would be inventing a store. What it has instead is a surprisingly good tropical greenhouse hiding inside a farm-road garden centre: Scott’s in Lincoln keeps a year-round houseplant and tropical section that covers everything from grocery-store pothos tiers to statement monsteras, ferns, succulents and the occasional trendy aroid, along with the pots, tropical soil mixes and grow-light gear to keep them alive through a New Brunswick winter.

Beyond Scott’s, the houseplant supply chain here is a patchwork. Downtown florists carry green plants alongside cut flowers and will order in for you if you ask. The Co-op Country Store’s indoor growing section handles lights, nutrients and media. A small operation called Green Room Plants has been listed on Forest Hill Road selling indoor and outdoor plants with delivery; it appears to be a very small venture, so call (506) 999-5606 before treating it as a destination. And the local buy-and-sell groups on Facebook do a steady trade in cuttings and rehomed plants, which is honestly where half the city’s hoya collection circulates.

Two seasonal notes for houseplant people. First, winter transport is the real killer here: a tropical plant can be damaged by a few minutes at minus twenty, so any reputable shop will sleeve or bag your plant, and you should warm up the car first rather than letting a ficus ride shotgun in the cold. Second, watch for the Fredericton Botanic Garden Association’s poinsettia fundraiser in late fall and for pop-up plant vendors at seasonal markets; the pickings between November and March reward people who keep an eye on our events calendar.

Timing the Season: When to Buy What in Zone 5

Fredericton sits in plant hardiness zone 5, and the frost does not care how nice the last week of April felt. The traditional local planting marker is the Victoria Day long weekend in late May, and even that comes with an asterisk: seasoned growers here often hold tender annuals and tomatoes until the very end of May or the first days of June, because a single late radiation frost in the river valley can erase a whole weekend of planting. Cold-tolerant stuff (pansies, peas, spinach, onion sets) can go in weeks earlier; peppers, basil and impatiens should not.

The buying calendar matters as much as the planting one. Greenhouse selection peaks in the first half of May and the unusual varieties go first; if you want a specific tomato or a particular hanging basket colour, mid May at Scott’s or Currie’s beats June anywhere. Conversely, late June brings markdowns on annuals that are perfectly rescueable, and late summer brings shrub and perennial sales as nurseries clear stock they would rather not overwinter. Fall is also the honest time to buy spring bulbs, which show up at the Co-op, Scott’s and the big boxes by September.

Seeds deserve their own line item. Between Scott’s seed wall, the Co-op’s racks of Halifax Seed, McKenzie and Ontario Seed Company packets, and the seed swaps and giveaways that surface around town each spring, there is no need to mail-order the basics. Order the weird stuff in January like everyone else, and expect the popular local varieties to sell through by April.

Soil, Compost and the Dirt on Dirt

Bagged soil is everywhere; the real question in Fredericton is bulk. Every garden centre named above sells bagged triple mix, manure, peat and potting soil, and for a couple of raised beds that is fine. The math flips fast, though: past roughly a cubic metre, delivered bulk soil costs a fraction of the bagged equivalent. Fredericton Landscaping runs a bulk supply operation with by-the-yard compost and manufactured topsoil delivered in the city, Wetmore’s on Riverside Drive supplies soil and sod at scale as part of its landscaping trade, and the Kent stores move bulk aggregate and mulch in season. Get quotes in April; everyone’s delivery calendar jams solid by mid May.

On the disposal-and-recycling side, the City of Fredericton is genuinely useful. Curbside yard waste collection runs monthly from May to November, on the last full week of each month alongside regular garbage; leaves go in compostable paper bags (never plastic), and branches up to 5 centimetres thick and 1.5 metres long go out in tied bundles. For bigger loads, the city’s soil management facility on Beek Court in the Vanier Industrial Park is open around the clock seasonally from April through November and accepts leaves, grass clippings, sod, soil, small branches, wood chips and manure. Note what it does not take: lumber, stumps, big logs, food waste, or diseased ash and elm wood, which has its own rules thanks to the emerald ash borer file.

The city’s official advice, and it is good advice, is to skip the hauling where you can: compost at home and leave at least some leaves where they fall, since decomposed leaves feed the soil and the layer shelters overwintering pollinators. If you want to close the loop completely, a backyard composter plus one annual delivery of bulk compost covers a serious vegetable garden’s needs for the year. Questions about any of it go to Service Fredericton at (506) 460-2020.

A charming piece of civic trivia while we are in the dirt: since March 2024 the city has grown its own street trees at a small solar-powered municipal nursery on Two Nations Crossing, raising up to 5,000 native seedlings (sugar maple, red oak, white spruce, even black walnut) from locally collected seed. You cannot shop there, but the tree that eventually shades your street may well be a born-and-raised Frederictonian.

Free Expertise, Plant Sales and the Gardening Community

The cheapest gardening upgrade in Fredericton is other people’s knowledge, and there is a lot of it lying around. The staff at Scott’s and Currie’s field beginner questions all day and are used to the classic local puzzles: clay pockets, riverbank flooding, and the eternal what-ate-my-hostas question (deer; the answer is always deer). For woody plants, Corn Hill’s counter staff and Bob Osborne’s books on hardy trees, apples and roses are effectively the regional reference set, and Osborne spent years dispensing advice on CBC radio, so the older gardeners in your life can probably quote him.

The Fredericton Botanic Garden Association is the volunteer heart of the scene. Its annual spring plant sale at the garden’s resource centre at 10 Cameron Court (off Prospect Street, beside Odell Park) is the best value plant day of the year: in 2026 it runs Saturday, May 23 from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. and Sunday, May 24 from noon to 4 p.m., with a wide selection of native plants and ornamentals, much of it divided from members’ own gardens and therefore already proven in local conditions. Miss it, and there is typically a Second Chance sale later in the season, plus the poinsettia fundraiser in late fall. The Botanic Garden itself is free to wander and functions as a living catalogue of what thrives here.

The community layer runs deeper still. The Fredericton Garden Club meets and shares through the growing season, NB Community Harvest Gardens coordinates community garden plots around the city and has run a seed library, and groups like the Fredericton Organic Community Garden and Greener Village’s garden programs put shovels in new gardeners’ hands every year. If you want a plot of your own, or just want to learn beside people who know what they are doing, start with our guides for the community gardens rundown and keep an eye on the events calendar for workshops and sale dates.

The pattern behind all of it: Fredericton’s gardening economy is small enough that the growers, the volunteers and the customers are mostly the same people. Buy from the folks who grew the plant, ask them what died in their own yard, and you will save more money than any coupon ever will.