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.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

We buy a new toy

Normally I wouldn't refer to a van as a 'toy' but this one is quite cute and toy like!

Stewarts are gradually replacing our lease vehicles with ones we've bought outright, as I mentioned before. In fact my little corner of Stewarts needs to replace up to five vans this year, and here's the first one. Two more just like this are coming soon.

It's going to Debra, who apart from being Stewarts' longest serving maintenance technician, also runs our popular Christmas Tree service, so deserves a shiny new van.

I'd like to say "look out for a Stewarts liveried Peugeot Bipper" but we are 'between vehicle liveries' at the moment, but when we do decide what it's going to look like, no doubt I'll be blogging about it here.

I'm probably not meant to say this, but there's a new Stewarts logo being introduced in phases so it'll feature on our vans - you heard it here first...

Jonathan

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

What's that in our van?

 We went to a private estate in deepest rural Dorset this morning to collect a large event hire from a marquee in their grounds, which involved driving our delivery Transit van across open fields, which was interesting!

Anyway, we left our van open while collecting more pots and came back to find an infestation had taken place - of a French Bulldog!

One of the two gardeners on the estate has two of them - pedigree dogs of a high standard - and as an English Bulldog owner and lover of similar breeds, I would have happily tucked one under each arm and taken them home with me.

The only problem was getting either of them to stand still long enough for me to take a picture. The second picture is about the best I managed. So cute!

Jonathan

Wednesday, May 08, 2013

Is this the best Anthurium ever?

Last summer I took the picture on the right of this Anthurium in a desk bowl in a car dealer we supply plants to in Christchurch, the same one that has this funky bonsai trough.

I meant to blog about it, as it had clearly been in place for a while and was going from strength to strength.

We don't bank on Anthuriums lasting more than a couple of months in offices; of course we change them for free when required as part of our maintenance service, but unless contractually required we don't change happy ones like this!

Anyway, what really triggered me to get round to blogging this picture was my visit to the same contract yesterday, nine months later, only to find the same
Anthurium, if anything looking even bigger and better! A credit to Tracey's, and lately Michelle's green fingers, though to be fair car dealerships make ideal places to keep plants alive as they tend to be very light. That's how we're able to put bonsai Ficus in so many of them, as I've mentioned before.
  One last thing, and hope this is not too rude for a family blog: one of my clients - who struggled to remember all the proper names of the plants in her contract - once named Anthuriums "Willy of the Valley". I can't think what she meant...   Jonathan

Wednesday, May 01, 2013

Name that Dracaena

I have a new member of staff since I last blogged (sorry for the gap).

As long-term readers will know, this doesn't happen often as we have very loyal staff, in fact Michelle is my first new starter since May 2009!

She has conformed to a cliche for new technicians - namely being given a plant ID book by me and proceeding to order some of the odd plants that the rest of us don't use.

So on one order from Holland I had all these wierd and wonderful Dracaenas, namely:

Left back: Dracaena Surprise

Foreground: Dracaena Riki

Right: Dracaena Jade Jewel

No reason why we don't use these more often, but once you've been doing maintenance for a few years, you tend to stick to what you trust. So who knows? You may be seeing more of these slightly rarer Dracaenas in the future.

Jonathan