Plant Labels You Can Write And Erase

Over the winter Allsop Home & Garden sent me two packs of plants labels you can write and erase. While you can make your own plant and seedling labels/markers out of recyclable materials, sometimes it is nice to have a polished garden item or two around.

The plant labels themselves are a sturdy rubber material that is pre-printed with illustrated silhouettes of a number of herbs and ornamental garden plants. You can write the names of your plants or seedlings on the label, if the time comes when you need to change what you wrote you can rub it out with an eraser. The packs of plants labels also come with miniature shepherd hooks, which are also well-constructed.

The rosemary plant growing in my container garden gets a plant marker all for itself.

The plant labels, as you can see they come pre-printed with illustrations of some popular herbs, perennial and annual garden plants. The labels are suppose to be UV resistant and so far they haven't faded in the sun and the names I wrote on them haven't washed off either. The cool thing about these plant labels is that they're intended to be re-used in the garden season after season.

Here is what they look like when you've added the rubber plant label to the mini-shepherd's hook. I was actually surprised by how sturdy the metal hook is. I was expecting them to be easy to bend and they're not. The hooks are great if you have kids or pets that are always trampling the plant tags in your garden.

The re-usable plant tags come nicely packaged in sets of six. You can choose either the herb set or the ornamental plant set. While the plant tags are sturdy, beautiful additions to the garden, I have a couple of issues with them. The first seems kind of petty to me but I have to mention it. While I understand the size of the shepherd's hooks make packaging and shipping easy, I wish they were longer. After sinking a few of them in the garden's soil I realized I couldn't see the plants labels unless I got close to the ground. Their size is great for container gardens, but if you buy something as attractive as these labels for your garden, you should be able to show them off.

You can write any plant name on them that you choose, but I'd like the illustrated silhouettes of the ornamental tags to match plants I actually have in my garden, and that's the only drawback I can see in buying pre-printed plant tags. I don't have any grasses or water lilies and whatever the other two pictured above are suppose to be. Which brings me to my final "issue" with these plant labels. It probably wouldn't hurt if the packaging for the herb/edible plant tag collection came labeled. These tags would probably appeal mostly to new gardeners who don't already make homemade plant tags, and I'm not going to lie; I had to really think to identify a couple of the leaf silhouettes. Everything about gardening should be easy to explain and understand for new and older gardeners, and that goes for plant labels.

All in all, I think these plant labels you can write and erase to use again and pretty awesome. It would be nice if they created some plant tags like these for garden bulbs. They're sturdy and beautiful additions to your garden. If you're interested in purchasing them visit Allsop Home & Garden, who gave me these plant labels to try in my garden.

Update: 7/11/2010

While these plant labels are pretty and useful I've noticed that mine have turned yellow in the sun. Perhaps it is the nature of the clear plastic, but it is a bit unsightly.