Plants that improve your office's air quality

I often get asked to provide plants specifically to improve the air in a modern office. As you may be aware, the air in modern air-conditioned offices contains a lot of impurities, and the right kinds of plants really can make a difference by absorbing a lot of the nasties. A lot of offices with aircon have very dry air, so the increase in humidity is useful too. Believe it or not, it has been shown that a sufficient quantity of plants relative to staff numbers can actually pay for themselves by reducing the cost of absenteeism due to sickness!

Don't believe me? There's a mass of data available at the Plants for People website to back me up.

As for what plants work best, you need a lot of leaf area, so broad-leaved plants are best, and high humidity is encouraged by thirsty plants. So a broad-leaved Ficus, like the burgundy rubber plant I installed in Southampton last year is ideal.


Air-improving alternatives to the Ficus family include broad-leaved Dracaenas, Spathiphyllums and Aglaonemas. You'll find pictures of all of these on the main office plants website.

How many vans can we get in the greenhouse?

Ummm... that'll be one then. We're doing a one-day hire to a training event in Blandford Forum, Dorset on Monday. Plants need to be in place by 0830, so rather than load up in the morning, we've loaded on Friday afternoon and left the doors open. Obviously we have to park the van in the greenhouse as the plants (a mixture of Ficuses and Kentia palms) need to be kept above 15 deg C.

The trouble is we can't get out of the greenhouse now, so it looks like we're in here until Monday too! D'oh...

Edit. Monday morning: we did of course squeeze out on Fiday and delivered the plants on time this morning, with the added benefit of a toasty warm van when every one else was scraping ice off their cars.

This is where we will look after office plants

I keep trying to describe our coverage area in previous posts, but it's quite wordy, as it consists of several part-counties (e.g. in Devon we'll go to Exeter, but no further; sorry, Plymouth!).

So I decided to use my extensive MS Paint skills to draw a coverage map and post it on the blog (acknowledgements to Streetmap!).

Note that this line is quite 'fuzzy' (it's not just your eyes!), in other words our key areas are Dorset and Hampshire); we get more choosy as we reach the red line. However if you're just outside the line and you're looking at quite a major project, then do contact us - we do make exceptions!

No danger of Stewarts running out of pots!

At the risk of repeating what I've said about our very affordable resprayed pot range, I thought I'd show potential office plants customers that there's plenty of options when it comes to reusing our second-hand pots.

This picture shows about half of them, the big line of our ever-popular Zenith range at back right consists of over a hundred alone, and all can be resprayed in any colour you can imagine.

This makes particular sense if you're buying a large number of plants for an office, as the saving on the initial outlay is significant, and as I've mentioned before the quality is as new.

So if you're in our coverage area (Bournemouth, Southampton, rest of Dorset & Hants, South Wiltshire etc.) and you're on a tight budget, get in touch. If you're fairly local to our base in Wimborne and you want an excuse to get out of the office for a while, I'd be happy to show you what's available.