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, March 05, 2015

Featured plant: Codieum Tamara

Wow.

Not often a new plant species just blows me and all my colleagues away, but this one has.

This image of beauty is called a Codieum Tamara.

Apart from being a lovely white and green variegated shrubby plant in its own right, what has got this plant such attention is how different it is from the rest of the Codieum (or as we tend to refer to them, Croton) family.

All the rest of the Codieums are red, yellow and green, like the image below, so this is a remarkable difference. We like plants that don't look like their relations, there will be another like this as next month's feature plant.

I intend to take this and plant it in one of my own maintenance jobs in Gillingham, North Dorset, so I can see how it performs.

I'd like to say we'll be getting more in, but my Dutch grower tells me they are one of those plants that comes to the market in batches, then disappears for a while. When I can't regularly get plants I can't use them in quotes for new contracts, but I can get the odd one in and let my maintenance staff use it in their clients' sites.


As I said above, the picture below is what a Codieum/Croton should look like. Can you spot the

difference?

Jonathan


















Monday, March 02, 2015

Ten years at Stewarts


Ten years ago, on March 1, 2005, Stewarts bought another company called West End Plant Displays, based in Winchester.

Apart from the maintenance contracts we acquired (many of which we still look after today), we acquired their two technicians, Roger and Ian.

We must be a good place to work as they both still work here today!

Six years ago I calculated that my staff had 116 years of experience looking after indoor plants, a lot of that is down to these two. Roger's been doing it since (I believe) 1990, and Ian since 1980!

I've also said before that there's no substitute for experience when doing our job; these guys have it in bucket loads.

As they both live in Eastleigh, north of Southampton, they only visit us once a fortnight, the rest of the time they are looking after all our clients that are to the north and east of Southampton and Eastleigh, including Portsmouth, Fareham, Basingstoke and Winchester. So if you are one of our clients in these areas, they will look familiar.

Roger reached official retirement age last autumn but he still won't leave, instead cutting down to three days a week. This is one of those industries that you never escape.

Jonathan (1998 to the present!)