The Scottish Government says the sale of peat is to be banned, as part of wider plans to protect peatlands and reduce carbon emissions.
Holyrood adds that, as most extracted peat is used for horticulture, it is looking for views from gardeners and commercial growers.
The government is also asking for comments from industry - those who extract peat, those who supply it, garden centres and other users of peat such as the fuel and whisky industries.
The intention is to ban the retail sale of peat for home gardening first, before considering how a wider ban would affect commercial users.
Environment Minister Mairi McAllan said: "Peatlands are an integral part of our cultural and natural heritage and cover over a third of Scotland's land area.
"In good condition, they help mitigate climate change and can support communities with green jobs. In poor condition, though, the benefits are lost and peatlands become a source of carbon emissions.
Fighting climate change
"Restoring Scotland's peatlands can help us fight climate change, support biodiversity and provide good, green jobs - often in rural communities. This is why we have invested £250million to restore 250,000 hectares of peatlands over a 10-year period to 2030.
"Hand in hand with our efforts to restore degraded peatlands, we must also do all we can to protect them. This means we must consider how to stop using peat, whether extracted in Scotland or elsewhere.
"We welcome a wide range of views to this consultation to ensure that we can set dates for ending the sale of peat that are both realistic and ambitious."
The director of Horticulture at Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Raoul Curtis-Machin, said: "The use of peat by gardeners now needs to be seriously challenged, when healthy non-degraded peat bogs in Scotland are critical in our fight against climate change and are immensely valuable for biodiversity.
"The Royal Botanic Garden is dedicated to plant conservation and stopped using peat more than 20 years ago, with no negative impacts on our world-class horticulture.
"Materials like milled pine bark and other fibrous woody material have proved to be a successful alternative to peat, even for the most challenging plants such as rhododendrons."
Commercial extraction
In Scotland, a small area of peatland -1,000-2,000 hectares from a total peatland area of over 2million hectares across the country - is used for commercial peat extraction.
Peat has been forming on earth for roughly 360million years. It is an organic layer of soil that consists of partially-decomposed organic matter, derived mostly from plant material, which has accumulated under conditions of waterlogging, oxygen deficiency, high acidity and nutrient deficiency.
Scotland's flow-country bogs have been growing for more than 10,000 years - ever since the glaciers melted away at the end of the last Ice Age, and the peat can now be more than 30ft deep.
WWF says the peatlands in the UK together store more carbon than all of our forests put together.