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, February 22, 2016

A nice display of matching planters

Just saving and cataloguing all the images from a large installation we carried out on Friday in Poole.

As I've mentioned before, I name all my photos by what they are show. So this one will be named '3 x pearl red KU2 Ficus Burgundy', which means if I search our database for a pearl red pot, a KU2 or a Ficus Burgundy, I'll find this image.

We have (I am guessing) several thousand images saved; there are almost infinite combinations of pot, colour and plant, and it helps to have something to show a potential client what I am proposing.

As with these blog posts I hyperlink my quotes too, so if you click on a plant or pot name it takes you to an image of the same.

Anyway, I digress. Sometimes I surprise myself by how artistic our plant displays look, and how I manage to take a non-blurry picture of them.

I'd be more proud if this one wasn't entirely accidental: these are the wrong plants. The right ones (Dracaena Magentas) didn't show up on the order, so these Ficus Burgundies are just stand-ins for a couple of weeks.

Which I'm starting to think is a shame.

Jonathan

Monday, February 08, 2016

A warning on this cold, windy day

Just a quick post as Storm Isobel batters the UK (and blows my fruit tree frame over at home God-dammit!).

I know I've said so before, but if you are transporting indoor plants (either from where you have bought them, or if you are moving house or office) take great care when a cold wind is blowing like it is today.

Here at Stewarts, we wrap our plants in fleece or plastic bags when transporting our plants in the winter, and we pre-warm our vans when it's very cold.

Wind chill will kill a sensitive house plant in a matter of seconds; a plant can cope with a period of static cold fairly well, but a cold wind will do for them very quickly indeed.

As I found out as an inexperienced maintenance technician at Heathrow Airport many years ago, when I killed a Dracaena Ulysses just carrying it across a road on a cold, windy day.

Jonathan

Thursday, February 04, 2016

Free advertising

The advantage of being part of a garden centre company is that we have a captive audience and plenty of space to put up signs advertising our wares.

But I am particularly pleased with this large sign showing off Stewarts Interior Landscaping's services that is now displayed on the wall of the Broomhill garden centre as you drive in to the car park, along with a similar advert for Exterior Landscaping, and the coffee shop.

A similar set will be going up somewhere at Christchurch.

The signs have been sitting in my greenhouse, getting in the way some would argue, for a week or so, and my manager began agitating for them to get put up. However, all the usual go-to guys for this kind of task were unavailable, so as a desperate last resort she turned to me. So, along with my trusty assistant Michelle, we put them up this lunchtime.

I was of the opinion that the person putting the signs up got to put their own department's sign in the middle!

Jonathan