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.

Friday, January 20, 2012

2nd hand pots: it's an ill wind...

...that blows no one any good. Read on...

As explained in detail elsewhere on our website, we have a large stock of second hand plant containers, as a by-product of the fact that many of our customers rent their pots from us, so we get the pots back if the rental deal ends or is renewed with new pots.

In a recent post I showed you our pot stock in its lovely tidy new home.

Sometimes we get plants in pots back from a contract in such good condition (often better than new if the plants have developed nicely) that we can't bear to dispose of them, and we hold on to them in the hope that a new owner will be found for them as they are.

Sadly, a chain of car dealers we look after went out of business recently and we got two sets of magnificent plants back, some which had only recently been installed, some though were over five years old. Car showrooms are very light, so plants tend to do very well in them (with our maintenance, anyway!).

I am happy to report that we have found homes for almost all of them, including the whole set of nearly new displays - like the one illustrated - which have not only gone back in to a car dealer, but in my opinion a much nicer one - much more my kind of cars. Meanwhile, the new clients benefit from much better rental terms than they would have done with brand new plants and pots.

It also has to be said that we have installed so many of these bonsai Ficus Ginsengs in car showrooms that it's verging on a Stewarts cliche (or a 'house style', at the very least). But you must admit a bonsai tree in a nice plain tall pot like this just looks right in this kind of location.

Now a picture of what all those plants were for


Well, half of it anyway - the other half being beyond the stairs.

This is what the huge quantity of plants in my previous post were obtained for: ~60ft of stage front to be turned into a mass of greenery for a dance championship in Bournemouth.

I can't take all the credit: my floristry-trained boss Rebecca took over the laying out, and I happily let her. Though I did choose the plant species - how many different ones can the indoor plant fans spot in this pic? I believe there's 18.

As I mentioned, we also provided all the fresh flowers.

As of a couple of hours ago, all these plants (400 small plants and 60 specimens) are back in my greenhouse, which is now rather full.

Oh, and it's our quarterly stocktake at the end of the month, so by filling my greenhouse to this extent, I've rather created a rod for my own back, haven't I?

So... if anyone wants a lot of indoor plants in hurry, I'm your man! Any offer considered!

Jonathan

Friday, January 13, 2012

I got a bit carried away ordering plants



Every other Monday I send an email to our Dutch plant supplier telling them what I want delivering later that week. Usually I get between three and six trolleys of plants but this week I ordered eight trolleys packed to the top with lovely bushy plants.

So many plants that we've completely run out of bench space for them. The reason for this extravagance? Next week we are providing a huge (and very lush) temporary display in front of the stage at an event at a conference centre in Bournemouth. 60 feet of plants 5 foot deep takes a lot of stock. All the plants you can see here are for this job.

We are also supplying the fresh flowers for the same event.

I haven't quite worked out what I'll do with them all afterwards; most will get fed into the stock for replacements as part of our maintenance service but some are plants we rarely use, so I'm thinking of holding a Stewarts Interior Landscaping 'garage sale' in the early spring. Watch this space....

Jonathan