A glimpse inside our new greenhouse

I took this photo as a celebration of the fact I'd just moved all these plant pots from the next bay along on my own. It took about two hours!

They don't look like a very big pile in this picture; there's probably a couple of hundred. Each of those very carefully stacked piles in the middle is four wide, two or three high and about ten long.

The space you are looking at will be our plants storage area. I moved the pots as the racking in the bay next door is arriving in two days.

I've just found out the plant benches (which go where these pots are now...) are arriving in about a week. So I'll have to move them again!

Jonathan

Feature plant: dead Dracaena Riki!

No sooner had I posted the previous feature plant article on the Dracaena Riki than one of my staff (Jo, who I blogged about the other day) sent me a photo of one of our plant displays in one of her clients between Bournemouth and Poole.

Thankfully the state of this plant is not an accurate testament of her maintenance skills, but one in a room that we have not been able to gain access to for approaching a year.

I said in my previous post that Dracaena Rikis need very little water, but even these have their limits!

Though if you look at the bottom left, even after all this time and the very hot summer we have had, there is a little bit of green leaf showing on the bottom left.

Jonathan

Feature plant: Dracaena Riki

The Dracaena family is not only a rich vein of plants for Stewarts to use in our maintenance contracts, but also a rich vein of feature plants for articles like this.

As I've said before, there are a lot of different types.

Dracaena Riki is a little different from the others; most Dracs have very soft foliage, whereas the Riki's leaves are strongly ridged and rather stiff.

This photo doesn't really do them justice, they have a rather lovely light/dark green variegation - close up below. They are very good performing plants... IF you can restrain your watering can! They seem to drink noticeably less than almost any other Dracaena, and if you do get them too wet the leaves will start tipping, and never stop.

So they aren't popular with all my maintenance staff, though those with a very light watering touch seem to love them.

Incidentally, this plant is in Stewarts' head office building in Christchurch. The pots are Pantone 703 coloured; that's the rose pink in the Stewarts flower logo.

Jonathan 

One very excited Stewarts technician

Jo is our newest maintenance technician, and as yet our attempts to crush her spirit by employing her at Stewarts have failed. Give me time...

Over the weekend she sent me this fantastic photo of her visiting the Eden Project in Cornwall. She reported back that it was most enjoyable seeing all the plants we use in such a natural-looking environment.

I think my favourite image was this bank of enormous Calathea Triostar (below). We do use these but they really like a bit more humidity than we can provide, so they aren't the easiest plant to care for in an office.

Jonathan

Fame at last

I am currently going through all our client files and adding a Streetview image of the buildings for the internal documents that our maintenance staff use to find sites.

While doing this site in Poole, I spotted one of our own vans double-parked outside.

Even funnier, it wasn't the regular driver but a holiday cover visit, and the driver was stood by me while I was looking and recalled the occasion she had been there.

Fame at last!

Jonathan