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, September 27, 2017

Fake chimney!


As previous posts have remarked, I'm so on top of my workload that I've resorted to filing the last year's worth of photos of installations. As I remarked on here some time ago, we photo most of the new installations we do, then label the pictures to include the name of the plant and pot and also the pots colour, so we have a huge library of images we can call up to show to potential clients.

A lot of these are on our website here.

Anyway, I digress. Occasionally I see other things I photo, and have nowhere else to file them than on here. Last winter we were installing a couple of dozen planters in a new care home, part of a chain in Dorset that we look after. Part of the building was crowned by this magnificent chimney. What struck me as odd was there wasn't a fireplace in the room below, or a chimney breast for that matter. So how was this big heavy chimney supported?

Answer: it's a fake, made of glass fibre! Because I reduce the resolution of images I put on this blog, you can't really see, but the bricks are just a printed picture thereof, and I think you can just see a support wire behind leading to the roof. Amazingly realistic.

Is there any connection between this and what we do? I guess it shows the versatility of GRP, the same material that the majority of our pots are made of. Now that's given me an idea: fake chimney pots as office planters!

Until that happens we'll stick to planters that look like planters. To the left is one of the ones that went in this care home. Matt light bronze is the chain's corporate pot colour; it looks just right in the very homely atmosphere that they strive to create in their premises. It's also one of our most popular colour choices at the moment.

Jonathan

Matt finish pots


Just a little post (while I'm having this quiet patch and spamming the blog) about matt finish pots.

I've mentioned these before (here and here for example), but this pot I've been planting up today is a great example.

Most of the planters we supply are made from GRP (glass fibre), which is a great medium as it can be made in small batches to many designs, and crucially is hand painted to order, so you can have any colour you like.

But the other crucial difference to make is whether to have a traditional gloss finish, or matt. There are advantages and disadvantages to both.

On some colours gloss can look very 'plasticky', but it is more durable and a lot easier to keep clean.

Matt lacquers are much better than they used to be, but they are still more prone to scratching, and the light colours in particular can be hard to wipe marks off. Having said that, they look a lot more natural. Certain colours (e.g. creams and beiges look pretty awful in my opinion in gloss, whereas matt looks much better.

The above example is matt black, which looks almost grey compared to gloss black. It's a really good match for black leather furniture in offices. My biggest ever install was mostly matt black, so I've seen a fair few.

Funny side note: this planter is having a standard Ficus planted in it and is becoming the retirement gift of the boss of one of our clients who had a similar tree in his office for many years, so he is being bought a 'mini me' version for his home. Makes a change from the old gold watch I guess!

Jonathan

Friday, September 22, 2017

Sideshow Boston Fern

Just a bit of fun here, which hopefully won't get me in copyright hot water with the makers of a certain US cartoon series.

We recently visited a long-standing client near Winchester who are about to have their entire building refurbished, so we were asked to remove and store all their 43 planters.

One of them was planted with a rather large Boston Fern (not as big as this one, cared for by the same maintenance technician, he obviously has the knack for these!), and I just loved the cartoon that they've stuck to the pot; they've even photo-shopped Bob's  hair to be the right colour.

The plant and pot are being separately stored at two Stewarts locations, and the cartoon is stuck to a noticeboard in my office, all to be reunited when our client wants them back.

The planters, by the way are aluminium, called 'Chique', and reassuringly expensive, so we are taking very good care of them.

Jonathan

Eight years on and looking good


The photo on the left was taken in June 2009 as part of our biggest installation ever (at the time, we've since surpassed it).

This 3m Ficus Alii was the largest plant in the scheme and I'm happy to say that through our skillful maintenance it's still going strong.

We were working nearby in Winchester this morning with all the equipment to prune and clean a tree so we went in to give it a bit of a spruce up.

Below are before and after shots of that process.

Ficuses like this tend to get a bit 'wild and woolly' over time, but this one has stayed remarkably static in both size and shape.

Most of our plants are covered by a stipulation that if we kill it we replace it, so it's good for our bottom line to keep them going, but it is also very satisfying for us from a horticultural standpoint.

Jonathan

Friday, September 15, 2017

Barrier Planters

Now that I am briefly quite on top of my workload, the blog posts are coming thick and fast!

I am going through photos of new contracts I've taken but not yet had time to file in our picture library. These date from last December, which shows how long our busy patch has been, and show something we sell more and more of: barrier planters.

Barriers are like normal troughs, but taller than they are wide, usually at least 60-70cm high.

These were installed in an office in Chandlers Ford, and are 2m long, so long we could only get them in the lift empty and on one end. Installing six of them was a full day, for sure!

They are almost invariably planted up with just a line of the same thing, in this case Dracaena Lemon Limes (nicely matching the desk dividers in the office there). They are made completely to order, so can be had in any colour, and crucially in any size you require.

They are more expensive to rent of course than a normal specimen in a pot - these are £38.00 a month each including our maintenance service - but then you get an awful lot more for your money.

Jonathan

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

We are moving house!


But not yet!

Regular visitors to Stewarts Broomhill will know there has been a lot of building work going on. All this is part of a long term plan to rejuvenate the garden centre, part of which plan is to take our area over as retail space, but in order to do so we have to have a new purpose-built building constructed to move in to.

Doing so entailed having an electricity line over the site buried; that and the inevitable planning issues meant that this has taken the whole 15 years I've worked at Stewarts to actually happen.

Those that wish to imagine me at my desk writing this blog will be able to picture me sat in a yet-to-be-built office in the front right of this structure.

But not until early next year...

Jonathan

Monday, September 11, 2017

Stewarts - Abbey Garden Centre

For those that don't know, Stewarts recently acquired an existing garden centre in Titchfield, and it's now trading as Stewarts Abbey Garden Centre. The photo to the left gives a clue to where the name originates.

We are spending money on it to modernise it somewhat, and one small part of that was the installation of a small number of planters for the cafe.

If you visit there you'll see these rather lovely matt green pots, featuring these bonsai Ficuses amongst other things.

On a selfish note, it's quite nice for our department. As those who know us well know, our coverage area extends much further east from where the two existing garden centres are, so it's nice to have a retail presence in Hampshire where so many of our clients are.

Jonathan