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, June 29, 2018

Feature plant: Monstera Deliciosa (Swiss Cheese Plant)


This feature plant post is as much about the vagaries of fashion and plant names than the actual plant.

When I started in interior landscaping twenty years ago, Monstera Deliciosa (commonly the Swiss Cheese Plant) was already deeply unfashionable, being one of those indelibly 1970s plants, all wild and shaggy with a tendency to get enormous.

Some old-timers also referred to it by the latin name Philodendron Pertusem, much to us young pups' bafflement.

I had a big line of them to look after in Heathrow Airport (where I began my career) and I hated them, as they did not do well there. 

For the intervening two decades the fashion has very much been for 'architectural' plants, though I've never quite worked out what that means. Spiky seems like a good synonym. Offices are getting more and more tightly packed, so plants that stay narrow (e.g. Dracaenas) are very popular.

Then all of  sudden a couple of years ago, the more hipster/interior designer clients I interacted with started to want lots of little plants rather a few large ones, but also wanted big, tropical broad-leaved plants... like the Monstera.

Laypersons will also notice that all of a sudden everything patterned has Monstera leaves on it: wallpaper, tea-towels, plates, you name it.

There is an obvious side effect to this: the price of Monsteras has absolutely skyrocketed. Up until a couple of years ago you would have been able to order a big, bushy 1.5m specimen grown up a mosspole from me for about £50.00 + VAT.

Now it would cost you about twice as much and - as the wholesalers are so desperate for stock - they are being delivered with growth only about 1.0-1.1m up the mosspole, like the rather puny effort shown on the left.

The smart money, if you really want to be a fashion victim, is to get a 'bush' plant like the one above right. Not as big, but at least they look better from the off.

Care advice, as far as I can remember? They are a low-medium light, medium water plant. They like
a warm, ideally humid location, where they aren't brushed against too much; that's what used to do for my row at Heathrow.

If you really want to spend some money there is a rare variegated type (Monstera Variegatum), with
gorgeous high-contrast white/green foliage. But prepare to spend a fortune; I have only ever ordered one 1.5m one about 15 years ago, and at today's prices it would be over £200.00. Incidentally: I know these are very hard to find, but I'm confident I can obtain one if you have stumbled on this post while searching in vain, so contact me at the address below if so.

Finally a postscript. As this post shows, everything comes round eventually. The price list I get sent by my Dutch supplier every week now refers to them as 'Philodendron Pertusem (Monstera)', so even the old name has come back in to fashion!

Jonathan