Terms

Last updated: August 30, 2026.

1. Who you are contracting with. Every order placed here is with Mysterious Yard LLC, a California limited liability company trading under the name at the top of this page. It is a one-person nursery in Contra Costa County, California — one grower, one packing table, one pair of hands.
Below, "I", "me" and "my" mean Mysterious Yard LLC, and "you" means the person placing the order. The first person is not a turn of phrase here. There really is only one of us.

2. What is sold here. Two different kinds of thing, and the difference runs through the rest of these terms.

• Live plants — ornamental cacti, Trichocereus and related columnar cacti, sold as plants, for growing and for display.
• Merch — shirts, stickers and prints carrying this yard's own artwork. Ordinary goods: printed in runs, held here, and packed by the same hands at the same table as the plants.

Nothing on this site is sold or supplied for consumption of any kind.
Where a section below says "plant" it means a live plant and does not cover merch, and where it says "merch" the reverse. A section that names neither applies to both.

3. Placing an order, and when I have accepted it. Paying is an offer to buy. I accept it when the order is packed and the shipping notice goes out, not before. Until then I can decline it — a plant that has already sold, a plant that fails its last look-over on the packing table, a size that turns out not to be on the shelf — and anything you were charged comes back in full.
I ship in the time stated on the Shipping & care page. If I cannot, I email you, tell you the new date, and you choose: wait for it, or cancel for a full refund. I will not sit on your money and say nothing.

4. Prices, payment and tax. Prices are in US dollars and are the prices shown on the page at the moment you order. They can change at any time, but never after you have paid.
The price on a plant is the price of the plant. Postage and sales tax are added at checkout and are shown to you before you pay. There is no handling fee, no packing fee, no heat-pack fee and no other mandatory charge of any kind. If you ever see one, it is a bug and I want to hear about it.
Card payments are handled by Stripe, on Stripe's own page. Card numbers never reach this site and I never see them.
If a price is obviously wrong — a decimal in the wrong place, a $200 plant listed at $2 — I will not simply take the money and say nothing. I will tell you what it should have been, and you can confirm the order at the right price or cancel it for a full refund.

5. Shipping, holds and risk of loss. How orders are packed, when they leave, where a live plant can be sent and when a box is held for weather are all set out on the Shipping & care page, and that page is part of these terms.
The destination limit and the weather hold are live-plant rules. Merch travels anywhere in the United States and is never held for weather on its own account — but a plant and a shirt bought together travel as one box, so a hold on the plant holds the whole parcel.
Risk of loss stays with me until the box is delivered to you. If a carrier loses it or destroys it on the way, that is mine to sort out, not yours; what happens then is section 7 of the Returns page.

6. Arrival, refunds and returns. The Returns page is part of these terms, both halves of it — the live-plant sections and the merch section that follows them.
Live plants: a plant cannot be returned once it has been posted, because a cactus that has been through the mail cannot be sold again. A plant that arrives dead or destroyed is claimed with photographs within 48 hours of delivery, through your order page. A claim that arrives later is still recorded and I still read it.
Merch: an unworn, unwashed item can be sent back within 30 days of delivery for a refund, at your postage, for any reason or none at all. A faulty, misprinted or wrong item is replaced or refunded and I pay the postage.
Both of those are on the Returns page, and your cart links to it before you pay, so nobody meets either rule for the first time after paying.

7. Living goods, and what I am and am not promising. A cactus is a living thing, not a manufactured item. Size, colour, scarring, corking and form vary from plant to plant, change with the season, and go on changing after the plant leaves here. Photographs show the actual plant, or a representative plant from the same batch where the listing says so.
What I promise is about the plant that arrives: that it is the plant in the listing, and that it arrives alive and undamaged. That is the 48-hour guarantee in section 6.
What happens to it afterwards sits outside that promise. Rooting, growth, flowering and survival depend on your light, your mix, your watering and your winter, none of which I control. That is a limit on what I am promising, not an attempt to take away a right you have: nothing in this section removes any protection California law gives the buyer of consumer goods, and where the two disagree, the law wins and this page loses.
This section is about plants alone. Merch is manufactured goods, and nothing here narrows what you may expect of a shirt.

8. What I am responsible for. If something goes wrong with an order, what I owe you is limited to what you paid for that order — a refund, a replacement, or both if that is what it takes to put it right.
That limit does not reach, and I am not trying to make it reach, anything California law does not let a seller limit: my own fraud, anything I do deliberately or recklessly to hurt somebody, injury caused by my own negligence, or a duty the law puts on me whatever this page says. If a court decides any part of this section goes further than it may, the rest of it still stands.

9. Reviews, and anything else you write here. Reviews are read before they are published, and here is exactly what that means, because a store that moderates reviews and will not state its own rule is worth nothing.
The rating is never a reason. A one-star review is published on the same terms as a five-star one, and what you see on the reviews page is not a selection of the kind ones.
Every review waits in a queue until I have read it, however good or bad it is, and one is refused publication only if it is spam or something I have good reason to think is fake; is abusive, harassing, threatening or obscene; is defamatory; carries somebody else's personal information or picture; attacks people for who they are rather than saying anything about what was bought; is plainly false or misleading; or is wholly unrelated to the plants and merch sold here.
Posting a review gives me permission to publish it on this site under the display name you chose, for as long as the site is up. You keep the copyright in your own words and your own photographs, and it is not exclusive. Ask me to take your review down and I will.
A review photograph is published only if you tick the two boxes saying the picture is yours and I may use it, and only after I have looked at it myself. Every image sent here is re-encoded before anything is stored, which strips out the location and camera data your phone writes into the file — I never see where you live.
Photographs sent with a damage claim, or with a correction to the Learn pages, are a different thing entirely: those are evidence for my eyes and are never published anywhere on this site.

10. What is on this site, and whose it is. The photographs, drawings, plant descriptions, cultivar entries and Learn articles here belong to Mysterious Yard LLC, unless something is credited to somebody else.
Everything factual was written from scratch off a cited fact list rather than copied, and every source is named with a link on the Sources page. Some of what I learned from is published under a licence that does not permit commercial reuse of the writing itself. Facts belong to nobody; the writing belongs to whoever wrote it, and none of theirs is reproduced here.
You are welcome to read this, link to it, quote a line with a credit, and send it to a friend. Reposting whole articles, entries or photographs, or feeding them into something of your own, is not something you have permission to do — ask me first, and the answer will often be yes.
If you think something here is yours and should not be, the Report content page in the footer is the route. I read it myself and it works.

11. Changes to these terms. I can change these terms, and changes are posted on this page with the date at the top. The version that governs your order is the version published on the day you placed it: a change made afterwards does not reach back into an order already placed.

12. Governing law, and where a dispute goes. These terms are governed by the law of the State of California, without regard to its rules about which state's law applies. If you live somewhere else, this does not take away the consumer protections your own state gives you — you keep whichever is better for you.
If we cannot sort something out between us, it goes to the state or federal courts serving Contra Costa County, California, and we each agree those courts may hear it.
There is no arbitration clause here and no class-action waiver. I have not asked you to give up a jury, and I have not asked you to give up joining with other people. Small claims court is open to either of us for anything inside its limits, and for the size of order this shop takes that is usually the sensible place.
Before any of that, though: write to me. I am one person, I answer my own messages, and very nearly everything that has ever gone wrong with an order was fixed by an email.

13. Contact. Questions about these terms, or about anything else on this page, go through the contact page linked in the footer of every page. Ask before you order rather than after. I would far rather talk you out of a bad fit than argue about a clause once the box has gone.