Creekside Gardens offers living Mother’s Day gifts as plants fly off shelves

Creekside Gardens in Eaton Township became the kind of last-minute Mother’s Day stop that makes more sense the minute you walk in. By the holiday, flowers and other plants were flying off the shelves, and Sherri Kukuchka said shoppers were hunting for “anything green” and “anything flowering” after winter.

That appetite is exactly why a living plant can beat a generic fallback gift. A bouquet fades fast. A flowering plant can keep going long after the Sunday brunch dishes are done, which makes it feel celebratory on arrival and practical for the weeks that follow. Creekside Gardens leaned into that appeal with evolving seasonal displays, a setup that gave shoppers something prettier and more personal than a grab-and-go card aisle.

The garden center is built for that kind of spontaneous stop. Creekside Gardens describes itself as a year-round destination greenhouse, event space and gift shop at 4 Village Lane in Tunkhannock, Pennsylvania. Its shelves rotate with the seasons, and the mix goes beyond plants to home decor, artisan gifts and locally made wares, which gives shoppers a few easy ways to turn a plant into a fuller present without planning days ahead.

The business also has the kind of backstory that explains why it feels like more than a retail stop. Kevin and Sherri Kukuchka first met as horticulture students in 1994, when the property was still a cornfield. The Cabin gift shop opened in 2011, and the Tunkhannock Farmers Market began there in the summer of 2017, helping turn the site into a year-round destination in the Endless Mountains.

Mother’s Day in the United States falls on the second Sunday in May, and in 2026 it landed on Sunday, May 10. The modern American holiday was created by Anna Jarvis in 1908 and became an official U.S. holiday in 1914, with flowers, cards and other gifts long tied to the day. Creekside Gardens fit neatly into that tradition, but with a smarter twist for shoppers who wanted something thoughtful without overplanning: give a plant, not a bouquet, and let the gift keep growing.

The garden center’s hours made it an especially easy same-day errand too, open Tuesday through Thursday from 10 to 5, Friday from 10 to 6, Saturday from 9 to 6 and Sunday from 10 to 4. For anyone in Tunkhannock and the surrounding Wyoming County area, that made Creekside Gardens one of the season’s most useful answers to the annual Mother’s Day scramble.