'Tis the season to be jolly unless you're still fretting over that yet-to-find perfect gift for the gardener or plant buff on your list. But a visit to an independently-owned garden center may just still your angst and unearth a treasure-trove of gift ideas.

Town & Country Nurseries in Haddam and Ballek's Garden Center in East Haddam, both multi-generational family-owned garden centers, offer a wide array of seasonal plants and greens, décor-enhancing houseplants, flowering plants and cut flowers. As with most full-service garden centers, they also stock associated gardening accoutrements and tools for the plant-grower.

Active gardeners are happy to have an extra set of hand-held pruners, a back-up pair of sturdy gardening gloves, and creams that soothe work-worn hands. A quality digging fork is essential for dividing perennials and blank plant tags come in handy for labeling shared plants and home-sown seedlings. Gift baskets can be fun when specialized for the indoor plant geek, the herb or kitchen gardener, the bug or bird watcher, or the youngster with a newly germinating love for gardening.

If you'd rather relax, pour a cup of eggnog and shop from click-and-send sources, remember that curling up with a new plant book is a favored winter pastime of many northern gardeners. In the book, "What's Wrong With My Plant? (And How Do I Fix It?)," David Deardorff and Kathryn Wadsworth guide gardeners through a step-by-step process to decipher plant problems. In "Bringing Nature Home," Douglas W. Tallamy presents convincing arguments for cultivating native plants, and Ken Druse's "Making More Plants" is a great plant-propagation guide.

For the grow-from-seed gardener, check out Connecticut-based "Kitchen Garden Seeds," which offers interesting seed collections such as French, Mexican or Heirloom combos, the Oddly Strange Vegetable Garden with white carrots and black tomatoes, or A Child's Garden of Wonder, with miniature and white pumpkins and purple-podded beans that revert to green when cooked.

If none of these choices strikes you as the perfect gift, think gift certificate. I've not met a gardener yet that doesn't gleefully anticipate choosing new plants for their gardens each spring and plant shopping is all the more fun with a gift certificate in hand.