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, January 13, 2014

Finally a good photo of a Dracaena Surculosa

One of my absolute favourite indoor plants is the Dracaena Surculosa, here's a really big one we once installed.

I had one at home but it didn't like the cold, and I have one in my own office.

The only problem with Surculosas (apart from being hard to spell) is that they are desperately un-photogenic, despite looking lovely in the flesh. This makes it hard to sell them to clients.

Part of the problem is that they tend to be trimmed into a bit of a 'lump' before they are despatched from the grower, where their beauty is the rather startling bamboo-like shoots they send skywards, that the grower has just trimmed off.

The other thing I love about them is the detail on their foliage, which my poor standard of photography can't hope to capture. So to illustrate below is a photo shamelessly stolen from elsewhere on the internet.

Anyway I digress. I did a large installation in Blandford Forum last week for a client who shares my taste for bright-coloured pots and a fairly simple planting scheme. The install included ten displays like this, i.e. 75cm high RAL 2004 Cylinders with 1.2m Surculosas in, and for once I managed to get a good photo of one. It helps that it's in good natural light; the Surc will tolerate lower light areas so tends to get used there, and there's nothing that makes a plant display look worse than flash photography.

I'll be adding a copy of this to my trusty sales portfolio, and adding this image to our large picture library shortly.

Jonathan

P.S. here's that detail shot:




Monday, January 06, 2014

Lovely weather we're having


Great weather for collecting Christmas trees this has been!

My colleague Michelle snapped this great shot on her phone as we were driving along the M4 west on Friday morning, minutes before the bad weather hit.

Behind us was bright sunshine, and it was lighting up the trees in the picture, but ahead of us was the blackest bank of cloud I think I've ever seen. It was amazing how quickly the weather ahead of us had changed from bright sunshine to this, too.

Needless to say, within a few moments of taking this picture we were driving through a really nasty - but thankfully short lived - storm.

This didn't stop us doing our bit for the Great Christmas Tree Pick Up. We collected six trees from Winchester, Basingstoke, Swindon, Salisbury and Blandford Forum. In total, Stewarts delivered 67 trees in Dorset, Hampshire and Wiltshire this Christmas, and collected virtually all of them in two days!

Jonathan