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.

Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Lovely little Bonsai trees


Only because I found out that they existed, I bought us a tray of these gorgeous little Ficus Ginseng bonsai trees. For scale, this one is about 25cm tall. They really are lovely, and don't possess the usual bonsai characteristic of 'dropping dead' (most bonsai are miniature versions of outdoor trees, so hate being indoors, whereas this is a specific indoor bonsai tree). We can get Ficus Ginseng up to 1m high, indeed we've just installed some in a Japanese car showroom where they look very appropriate, but can't beat these midgets for cuteness.

The problem is, none of us can think of an appropriate place in an existing customer to plant them; they're very easy to care for, but they ideally need to be in a small pot in a sunny spot.

Like my sitting room windowsill, where I now have a matching pair I bought for myself in pearlescent red bowls.

Not that that's why I bought a whole tray of them with company money of course...

Jonathan

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Summer baskets... but not yet!

Not a picture of a hanging basket, but of a frost-covered plant, to illustrate the point that on the 12th of May we just had a hard frost. At one point on my morning commute, my van's dashboard said it was -1 deg C outside!

Why am I saying this? Because at this time of year, Stewarts are selling lots of summer bedding plants, and Stewarts Interior Landscaping are (despite the name) supplying lots of summer hanging baskets, and summer plants should not be put out until after the last frost. We come under a lot of pressure from clients to have the summer baskets as early as possible and I always refuse to deliver until the end of May. However, my reasoning that there may be a late frost is usually scoffed at. This year it would appear that my pessimism is justified.

So if you want lovely summer hanging baskets - when I'm good and ready to let you have them - get in touch!

Jonathan


Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Caryota Mitis

Caryota Mitis, commonly called the fishtail palm because of its very attractive ragged edged leaves which look like fish tails.

It comes from South East Asia, so it prefers a warm, humid
habitat and is more tolerant of a drier soil than overwatering, and although it can stand full sun it can also tolerate low light levels. It prefers to be slightly pot bound and grown indoors can reach about 6ft, as with all palms do not prune, only remove dead branches by cutting off at the stem.

This is a plant that we do not use for a lot of our office plant displays, as it does best in a warm high humid atmosphere, and not so well in offices with heating that could be switched off at night, or air conditioning which keeps a cooler atmosphere, and the Caryota tends to tip (leaves get brown around the edges and looks dry).

We recently installed one as part of a interior landscaping contract in a poolside area, where it looked absolutely stunning and hopefully should do well, as it was very warm and humid, not the ideal place to be doing a planting job and we could have done with a dip in the pool when we had finished!!