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.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Keep your interior plants warm

So I got into our Wimborne base (at Stewarts Country Garden Centre) a bit early this morning and decided to defrost all the vans that are going out today as they had rock hard ice on the windscreens. After a few lovely February days it's certainly turning cold again.

One of the first things we drum into new recruits (when we ever need any) is the need to protect plants for offices from the cold when transporting them from our base to one of our customers across Dorset and Hampshire, and I thought that while winter is still here I'd go into a bit more detail.

As a general rule, indoor plants need to be kept above 15 Deg C. There are some exceptions to this (Yuccas, Kentia Palms, Fatsia Japonicas, to name a few) but this minimum temperature is a good guide. This is the night time temperature we keep our greenhouse to; you should see our heating bills at this time of year!

We expect our maintenance customers to maintain this minimum temperature too; it's a bit of a struggle not to get some clients to turn off the heating over Christmas, but most behave.

Having said that, indoor plants can be surprisingly resilient to cold if the temperature drops slowly. What really does for a lot of the more sensitive plants (for example the Dracaena group) is sudden bursts of cold air, e.g. being exposed to a cold wind. So we take great efforts to wrap our plants in fleece or plastic when moving them from the van into a building. I learned this lesson the hard way when I was a new technician at Heathrow Airport; I moved a cold tender plant from my van into a terminal pier entrance and killed it stone dead in 30 seconds due to the biting wind. For the domestic customer the advice is the same: don't do what I saw one person doing in London in the depths of winter - carry a tall houseplant in your car with the top sticking out of the open sunroof, whipping back and forth in the wind!

The other oddity is plants that are quite tolerant of low temperatures but don't like a cold draught. These are unsuitable for placing in a warm reception by the cold door, for example. The best example of this would be the Ficus family (Weeping figs, Rubber Plants, etc.).

Finally, how do you tell if your plant is cold damaged? There's several types of symptom depending on the species, and also to a degree how the damage happened (as described above). With Ficuses the tendency is to shed leaves (but that's what they do whenever they are unhappy). Badly damaged Dracaenas and other tender-leaved plants get a characteristic black colour to the leaves (rather than the usual brown when leaves die more naturally. The early sign that you can detect is a 'cellular' look to the leaves on tender plants - if you examine the leaves closely you'll be able to see the criss-cross pattern of the leaves' structure, and the leaf won't feel as 'plumped' as it normally would. This is worth looking out for if you're buying houseplants at this time of year from a shop, as it's an early sign that they've got cold at some stage.

Jonathan