Stewarts Office Plants

We supply many businesses across the South, from Sussex and Surrey, through Hampshire and Dorset to Wiltshire and Somerset. For more information about the services we offer visit our home page, or contact us here. In this blog you'll find news, interesting snippets, stories and pictures of our staff's adventures out on the road.

Monday, August 04, 2008

A challenging install goes like a dream

Remember how windy it was on Friday morning? We were up the end of Bournemouth pier at 07:30 installing nine Chamaerops Humilis palms in the al fresco seating area of the restaurant there, where it was windy enough to blow the palms off our trolleys, despite the fact we could barely lift them ourselves! That wasn't our only difficulty though:

1. The displays needed to be secured in position, but also removed for winter each year. Normally we bolt exterior pots through their bases, but this would have meant digging the plant out to undo the bolt - hardly ideal. So I came up with the idea of having some metal plates made (very quickly, by JP Design in Ferndown) that were bolted to the bottom of the pot in advance, and protruded out of the sides, enabling bolts to be fitted/removed without disturbing the plant. Complete success!

2. These required all sorts of drill bits, bolts, washers etc. to be used, on a windy day, on a surface that you could see the sea through the gaps in. I became careful to the point of paranoia about not dropping anything. On the other hand, sweeping up any spilled soil was a doddle - just sweep it through a gap!

3. Obviously there's no vehicle access to the end of the pier, so everything had to be trolleyed up (see comment above about the wind blowing things over), and the vehicle access to the end of the pier is only available until 10:00am. In the end, we left at 10:01, while a council employee stood patiently waiting to close the gate.


Despite all that, it went rather well, and the plants look great. Incidentally the pots are in two-tone gold on black, which we've never used before, but I suspect we will again as it looks rather nice. Good choice, Ruth.

You can see 'my' fixing plates sticking out of the sides if you look closely, but they're pretty discreet. The only issue now is whether we'll be able to lift the displays up when we collect them, as we planted them up in situ so we don't know how much the finished product actually weighs.