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, November 27, 2015

Name that Dracaena (again)


A couple of years ago, I blogged about a new staff member getting excited about all the different varieties of Dracaena that we rarely use, and ordering one of each.

Well, it's happened again. New technician this time is Anne, and she appears to have tried to order one of each of all the subtly different variations of green/white variegated Dracaena.

Back row, from left: D. White Stripe, D. White Jewel, D. Jade Jewel. Front row, D. Warnekii.

I think!

As I mentioned recently, these varieties are great in locations where everything is quite monochrome, as they almost look black and white themselves.

Jonathan

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Feature plant: Dracaena Burley

Regular readers will know that the Dracaena family is one of the most widely-used in interior landscaping. They are dark-tolerant, don't drink a lot, and pretty robust. But they need to be kept warm.

There is a huge variety of types, and while I know a lot of them, there is always something new to me. In this case it's the Dracaena Burley, as shown here.

It looks very similar in leaf type to Dracaena Massangeana but the leaves are somewhat tougher, leading me to think that it will be less prone to bruising/cold damage.

They are also only available in that intermediate zone between little plants we can use in bowls or troughs, and specimen plants that will stand on their own. This means we struggle to find a use for plants of this size.

However, we have recently sold five pots with three in each to a shopping centre in Southampton, which I'll be installing first thing tomorrow. As they come in boxes of six that means I have three left over, so yesterday I took one to one of my own contracts in Swindon and planted it in a 90cm high Cubis planter, that doesn't need a large plant in it (shown right).

Let's see how it fares!

Jonathan



Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Ready for Christmas?

We are!

This is a long a shot as I can manage (by the technique of standing on a shelf at one end of the greenhouse) to try and capture all our artificial Christmas trees ready for delivery. There's a few out of shot at the back  but this is most of them. Look at all the different colour combinations we can do! I rather like the red and green one on the right.

As time has gone by, we are doing more artificial, and less real Christmas trees.

This is a good thing as modern artificial trees are lovely looking things, and live trees can be a real pain, as I'm sure you all know.

The biggest pain for us is not being able to decorate them in advance, whereas we can start on the artificials nice and early.

The downside (there's always a downside...) is that we can no longer move in the greenhouse for made-up trees.

Want the really bad news? This is a pointless bit of PR for us, as we closed our order books a couple of weeks ago. So if you want to order one now for your office, you've missed the boat. Maybe next year?

Jonathan