The Saturday before Mother’s Day is a greenhouse owner’s equivalent of the Friday after Thanksgiving. This weekend was no exception. Between the dads and kids who were buying hanging planters as last-minute gifts and the gardeners who were there because buying stuff is what they do this time of the year, my favorite local greenhouse was jam-packed on Saturday.

But this shopping experience was nothing like the greed-fueled melees that occur in discount and electronics stores on the retailers’ Black Friday. Consumers didn’t stampede to be the first to buy a trailing petunia. No one took a left hook for picking up the blossoming Supersteak tomato plant that someone else was eying.

Sure, there were traffic tie-ups with customers’ wagons, which were loaded down with bedding plants and vegetables. The aisle widths allow barely enough room in some parts of the greenhouse complex for two wagons to pass and in some areas not enough room at all. Oddly, pedestrian congestion was met with cheerful patience, not the sort of pushing and shoving or toe-tapping exasperation we sometimes see in other retail environments.

I’m not sure I have ever heard so many apologies and pardons in any other crowded human space.

Early May greenhouse shoppers inevitably offer some comic relief, too. My favorites are the people who come in to get three tomato plants and don’t pick up one of those cardboard flats because they won’t be buying enough to need one. You can spot these people because they inevitably emerge from one of the greenhouses, sweat on the brow and clutching a dozen plants to their chest.

My other favorites are the couples who have different ideas about how much one should spend on garden plants anyway. In a typical vignette Saturday, I kept bumping into a woman whose kid-in-the-candy-store zeal and her husband’s good-natured bewilderment about the whole thing were hard to miss. She had pretty much filled her wagon with bedding and vegetable plants, when he started to move in the direction of the cash registers.

“Wait!” she cried. “I think I need just one more pansy.”

“Oh, I’m sure you do,” he said incredulously.

I particularly like to linger in the tomato greenhouse, taking in all the varieties, although this weekend that was a bit difficult. This year, one of my family members urged me to plant some less common and more colorful tomato plants for variety. Planting heirlooms is the easiest way to achieve that, so I’ve worked the Green Zebra, Pineapple, Yellow Pear and Husky Gold into the lineup.

On Saturday I was jostled out of the tomato greenhouse before I could find the Brandywines, so I’ll have to go back on a weekday when I can take my time to make sure there’s nothing I’ve missed.

One of the really fascinating parts of the greenhouse shopping experience is the checkout. Three stations were open Saturday, but I found myself at the cash register operated by a woman who has been ringing up my plant purchases for 20 years. I admire her expertise in these matters and trust her completely, even though her method appears haphazard. In another retail environment where bar codes rule, customers would be up in arms.

I presented her with three flats packed with herbs and vegetable and bedding plants in a variety of pot and package sizes. There were six-packs and four-packs and single plants. Within some categories, I even mixed up the pot sizes. For example, I had tomatoes in both 2-inch and 4-inch pots.

As she always does, she peered into the flat, moved plant leaves this way and that, bent down to look at the flat sideways and then rang up a price on the cash register. She performed this series of maneuvers at least three times on each of the flats before giving me the grand total.

“$77.79,” she said matter-of-factly. “Will that be all?”

“For today,” I replied.