This might seem obvious to long-time experienced gardeners but not all are aware of this practises in 'some' nurseries so feel a warning is warranted. I worked at a retail garden centre for a while & noticed that some of the whole sale nurseries that supplied our plants had ways of padding their profits. This happens mainly with perennials & smaller shrubs.

The larger the pot size a plant is in, the more money can be charged both to the retailer & the customer. I discovered this when a customer knocked over some plants & I went to clean up. The root ball had been knocked out of some pots & the loose planting medium was scattered. It seems that most of the plants in the larger pots had been recently planted from much smaller pots. The root balls were rather compacted & the roots weren't even loosened to spread out the way they should be when transplanted. The bottom half of the larger pots were just 'soil' with the plant plopped in & more soil pressed in around the roots. Unscrupulous nurseries do this with plants that have outgrown their previous pot size but not been transplanted earlier as they should have been.

Since that time, I've made it a practise to gently loosen the plant from the pot & pull out the roots (soil & all - it should come that way if properly planted) to check how it was planted & if the roots are badly compacted, rotted, or diseased in any way. Most plants brought to retail garden centres rarely stay around for that long to start showing problems either.

Obviously, pulling out the root ball isn't going to be possible with larger plants in 3 gallon & up containers but if you gently tug on the plant, holding onto the stem near the bottom, it shouldn't just give. You can tell if it's firmly planted & roots have spread or not. Make sure there's not a lot of roots coming out the drainage holes in the bottom either which usually indicates that it should have been transplanted into a larger pot long ago. Some roots showing isn't bad.

I used to think this was a practise of only a few wholesalers but it's more common than I thought. Of course, the top quality wholesale nurseries don't do this but remember, this is a business for profit like any other & if corners can be cut & there's little complaints from customers, it will be done. And these nurseries have to hire workers who do the actual transplanting almost assembly line style. They have to work fast & get as much done as possible. They rarely will care if the roots are nicely spread out & there's no air pockets between roots.