Garden.com wilts

Garden.com, one of the leading retail sites on the Internet, closed today. In a statement posted at the site, Garden.com said: "The company has been unable to raise the additional funding necessary to finance the company's growth moving forward, and our Board of Directors was forced to make the difficult decision to begin an orderly, staged shut-down of Garden.com's consumer business. During the first phase, we will be offering a going-out-of-businessâ product sale, which we plan to conduct with the same high-quality levels of service our customer's have come to expect." Garden.com was a model site for web-based interaction with customers. It offered gardening advice as well as a magazine, lots of gardening information and instruction on its site. Some customers complained, however, that product assortment and plant knowledge were lacking. The founders-Cliff and Lisa Sharples-often made a point of the fact that they were not gardening enthusiasts who took their hobby to the web but rather were MBAs who believed that garden supplies were perfectly suited to selling on the web.