Put Your Plants on a Pedestal

A floor plant stuck in a corner is a common sight in many room settings. This traditional approach often looks rather trite. Further, there typically isn't enough light in room corners or away from windows and the floor plant ends up looking rather sad.

Here is a design alternative to consider. Display a tabletop plant on a pedestal instead of a 5-6’ floor plant. It’s a cost effective way of accomplishing the same result. To my eye, it looks even better.

These are some advantages of pedestal plant display.

• More Cost Effective - A high-qualtiy sub-irrigated pedestal top plant will cost considerably less than a floor plant.

While there may be a significant cost for the pedestal, it is a fixed investment in furniture that requires little or no long-term maintenance.

• More Interesting to the Eye - The combination of a healthy plant, high quality planter, and pedestal can provide more eye appeal than a floor plant by itself.

You can also more easily change the look by frequent rotation of the featured pedestal plants. Floor plants can be a hassle to move.

• Healthier Plants - Very often, the desired plant location has insufficient light. Use a set of plants, one located in adequate light while the other is on display. The rehab light can be a small-scale compact fluorescent light fixture or a shelf with 4’ shop lights. It's a lot easier to provide adequate light for pedestal top plants than floor plants and they're much easier to move around.

I’ve done some searching and have found an amazing variety of pedestal designs. Some time in the future, I’ll learn how to use Photoshop to virtually place plants on pedestals. In the meantime, you’ll have to use your imagination.

For example, picture a high quality 2-3' Kentia or Rhapis palm on one of these pedestals. Now that would be a beautiful planting.

Most of these plants would benefit from a pedestal presentation.

Today’s pedestals are from Costco. There will be more from other sources in future posts. Click on photos for details.

Striking Sansevierias

This Japanese website has some photos of Sansevieria plants with particularly good design qualities. Unfortunately, I was not able to translate it but you can look at the photos, which are labeled with the botanical names. Most of the photos I find on the web are of plants in grower pots with little aesthetic quality. These are exceptional.

Sansevierias are excellent indoor plants. It’s unfortunate that so few of them are available at retail. Unfortunately there’s very little creative merchandising of indoor plants in the U.S. By the way, think about the marketing appeal of naming a plant Snake Plant or Mother-in-law’s Tongue.

I find Sansevieras readily adaptable to sub-irrigation using either a soil mix (Supersoil) or expanded clay pebbles (hydroculture).

Read more about Sansevieria from the archives.

Vines or Pebbles Ground Cover

When using arcane poke and pour top watering (drench and drain) it is necessary to have access to the soil surface to test moisture. With soil or expanded clay pebble (hydroculture) measured sub-irrigation you can decorate the soil surface to suit your fancy. There’s no need for finger poking.

You can view many samples of soil surface decoration here in this Flickr photo set. Note that you can enlarge the photos. Click on “All Sizes” on the menu at the top.

Ficus pumila (Creeping Fig) is a very good groundcover for use under tabletop Ficus benjamina (Weeping Fig) and Schefflera arboricola (Dwarf Hawaiian Schefflera) trees. The juvenile form has small leaves that are in scale with the tabletop trees and has the same cultural requirements. The mature leaves are much larger but you needn't worry about that with tabletop indoor plants.

Recently I have found a good selection of polished stone pebbles at IKEA and Wal-Mart. They’re packaged in small bags of various colors and stone sizes for about 70 cents a bag.

Soil surface decoration definitely adds a low cost finishing touch to high quality indoor plants. It's a small amount of added work and well worth doing.

Happy Holidays!

Click to enlarge. The Treeson cousins and I are wishing you peace whatever you’re celebrating wherever you are in the world.

They say they would be much happier if you would plant a tree in your workspace like this or somewhere outside. Urban Treeson in particular needs your help since he lives in the city where the air isn’t so good. Both indoor and outdoor trees help him and his neighbors a lot.

Using modern plant care methods, he has learned to use his black thumb in a green way. Would you please help him to spread the word this holiday season and in the coming year as well. Both of them thank you. Those you help maintain trees will thank you as well.

Holiday Gifts

Click to enlarge. Using “houseplant gardening” methods of installation and plant care, giving a so-called “houseplant” gift is a risky thing to do. The dreaded “drench and drain” watering method is tricky to learn for most people who have no ambition to become practiced gardeners.

Here are a couple of holiday gift ideas that make practical sense. Both plants are sub-irrigated in expanded clay pebble media, but the same method works with potting soil. The plants are growing in ordinary kitchen colanders inside decorative ceramic bowls. There is no need for finger poking, drainage holes or ugly saucers.

Both of these plants are hardy plants widely used around the world inside buildings. They are a staple of the commercial interior plantscaping business. With minimal care, they will last a lifetime.

A Desert on Your Desktop

Click to enlarge. Here is an idea if you’d like a visual escape from work on your desktop, workspace or anywhere else for that matter. It is the same planter pictured here. To my eyes, it is similar to a lighted aquarium. The keys to success are sub-irrigation and a 27-watt compact fluorescent desklamp.

As we know, cactus and succulents are high light requirement plants. I have set out to prove that you can maintain desert plants on your desktop using the artificial light from one of these natural daylight lamps. If you place the planter bowl directly under the lamp there will be about 2,000 foot-candles (20,000 lux) over the top of the plants.

Note: Position the lamp even closer to the tops of the plants than I show in the picture. One to two inches would be better.

An excellent method of light management is to connect the lamp to a timer. Using a timer, you can extend daylight in the desert beyond your work hours. However, if you’re burning the candle at both ends in your office maybe you don’t need a timer.

Did you know that when a website or houseplant book recommends a minimum of 100 foot-candles it really means 1,200 f.c. candles per day? Light for plants is based on a 12-hour day. Unfortunately, authors rarely footnote this fact.

Using artificial light, you can increase the minimum daily requirement by leaving the lamp on longer. For example, 100 f.c. x 16 hours = 1,600 f.c. divided by 12 hours = 133 foot candles. Using this method, you’ve increased the amount of light by one third.

Tabletop Tree

It may not be the star attraction, but it's nice to see this tabletop tree at least on the stage of a professional interior design. What a beautiful home kmr2069 has created. Take a look at a baptism party setting for his baby daughter...here, here and here. It must have been a memorable celebration.

I regularly search through hundreds of Flickr pics with design tags and find very few with plants in the photo. This was one of the rare finds in the interior design pool.

I have no idea how this little tree is maintained or if this is its permanent location. It doesn't matter. It's a welcome relief from the mainstream "houseplants" I encounter on the web, most of them in unadorned plastic grower pots or outdoor clay pots sitting in saucers. I often wonder if gardeners show photos of their kids or animal pets that look as unappealing.

It's no wonder most professional interior designers and architects are reluctant to include indoor plants in their portfolio photographs. That's a sad commentary. Plants in buildings deserve a lot better.

Less Than $10

Click to enlarge. This is a year round indoor plant…24/7, 365 days a year. It is not a so-called “house plant” that truth-be-known only lives indoors for 50-60% of the year and the rest of the time outdoors on a patio or in the yard.

This is just an ordinary 6” pot size Dracaena marginata from a big box store. Why in the world would you display it in its tacky plastic pot on a saucer when you could have this as a finished product for less than ten dollars...complete in a decorative planter with polished stones groundcover?

It’s growing in a clear plastic container inside an inexpensive plastic bowl (also from Wal-Mart) but it could just as well be a fine antique. When you water by measured sub-irrigation, you do not need a drainage hole no matter how many books or websites say you do. It’s easy to prove it to yourself.

Furthermore, when you maintain it by sub-irrigation, the plant will be healthier, live longer, and take less of your time. You also will not have fungus gnats because the soil surface is always dry as it should be even though the soil where the roots are is evenly moist...also as it should be.

Starlights Pruned

Click to enlarge. Pruning was the next step after splitting the Ficus benjamina Starlight. The plants were pruned and will develop thicker trunks because of it. The cuttings bundles (several stems each) are stuck into Grodan (rockwool) cubes. They will hopefully develop roots in a propagator. I recently bought a tray and dome lid propagator but this would also work.

And Then There Were Two

Click to enlarge. The Ficus benjamina Starlight previously shown here is no longer one plant with many trunks.

One clean stroke with a sharp chef’s knife and then there were two, each with five trunks.

Each of them is installed in a clear plastic storage container inside a decorative cachepot with no holes. There’s an aquapad under each inner container to facilitate capillary action.

Remember when watering that up is good and down isn't.

The next step is some pruning to shorten the long thin branches.

Ficus benjamina Starlight

Click to enlarge. This apparently is a Ficus benjamina Starlight according to the cryptic label information “Starlight Fi”. I bought it at Lowe’s for $7.97. I’m always looking for small leaf Ficus plants to make into tabletop trees. They are hard to find here in San Diego. This hybrid however has leaves that appear to be smaller because of the variegation.

My guess is that most of these trees will likely end up in someone’s home as you see it here. It will still be in the grow pot with a plastic saucer under it. To me that is like someone sitting around the house in their underwear.

This plant is an unfinished product to my eyes. It is significantly overgrown with long spindly branches. Growers simply cannot afford the labor cost of pruning but you can easily do it.

I will probably transform it by splitting it into two plants with some cuttings left over. Who knows how many little trees will be born.

I'll post a photo of whatever I do.

No-Drip Urban Containerscaping

This is a timely article advocating the display of plants in containers.

Container gardening is also the perfect solution if you live in an apartment but have a small deck or porch area, or live in the city where there is no soil at all.

This method is perfect for the busy person who goes from work to workout to children's activities with barely enough time for dinner, let alone gardening. But it is also a great idea for the elderly or disabled.

Growing plants in containers makes perfect sense, particularly in an urban setting. I don’t think of it as gardening however. The terms no-drip, water-saving, timesaving containerscaping relate more to the built environment that involves more hardscaping than earthscaping. Drench and drain container gardening in an urbanscape environment makes little sense.

Helen knows from experience that flowers planted in containers need to be closely monitored for watering. Because the amount of soil is small in a container, it dries out very quickly. Daily watering may be necessary, and even more on hot, windy days.

"You have to keep them watered," she said. "Other than that, they are very easy to take care of."

If more urbanites understood sub-irrigation (and hydroculture) as plant care methods, I firmly believe the market would be twice as big.

All of my outdoor deck plants are installed in sub-irrigation. Using modern methods, you can change your watering frequency from daily to weekly or longer.

Plus, all of the water goes to the plants rather than dripping on the floor or on your neighbor below.

Pictured here are Hibiscus, Mexican Weeping Bamboo (Otatea acuminata aztecorum) and Giant Timber Bamboo (Bambusa vulgaris 'Vittata'). Other plants not shown are Plumeria, Aspidistra, Bamboo Palm (Chamaedorea seifrizzi), Dracaena marginata, Rhapis excelsa, Zamia furfuracea, Fargesia nitida (a bamboo) Burro's Tail (Sedum morganianum), Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) and Tomatoes. I can't imagine there are any plants that wouldn't benefit from sub-irrigation containerscaping other than air plants such as bromeliads.

Modern containerscaping methods save time, are better for your plants and avoid any exposure to dripping water on your neighbors or their property. Drench and drain watering inside buildings or in an urban environment is unwise when better methods are clearly at hand.

Home Staging

This looked like good advice even if you’re not moving.

Excerpt: Some people just can't visualize. If you can't get rid of some of your home clutter- house plants for example - round them up and make a single display rather than have them in dribs and drabs through a room or the whole house.

Umbra Toss Can Planter

Click to enlarge A question was asked about this planter. No, it isn't a Lechuza planter. It's actually a toss can (waste basket) by Umbra purchased at The Container Store. It's our favorite planter. It needed just a bit of modification to properly stage the plant. I filled the bottom with plaster of Paris to elevate the grow pot. I also spray painted the inside white to increase the opacity.

Umbra is a Canadian company with a portfolio of well designed products. It's worth the time to explore their website.

What, me worry?

Interior plantscaping company news on Greenscaper.net.

Long Live Ben

Click to enlarge.This Ficus benjamina (Weeping Fig) with Ficus pumila (Creeping Fig) groundcover was purchased July 17, 1999, about 5.7 years ago. It is weighed and sub-irrigated approximately every 2 weeks. It uses 2.2 ounces of water per day on average. The watering interval could easily be stretched to every 3 or 4 weeks using sub-irrigation.

It has grown from a typical 6” pot size tissue culture plant in this time period. Imagine what it will look like in another 6, 12 or 18 years. Children could easily learn to care for it. There’s no green thumb required. Although not botanically correct, you could call it Banyan Ben if you like.

Think about this plant as a remembrance plant of a special occasion such as a birth, graduation, wedding, or the passing of a loved one. A Ficus benjamina maintained like this can be handed down to the next generation.

Peace lily (Spathiphyllum) is often marketed for this purpose. Unless you continually propagate the original plant, they do not have a long life span. Those in my lab are looking rather tired after 5-6 years.

Ben is not meant to be a bonsai with all the mystical baggage associated with the term. It is merely a Ficus houseplant maintained as a “tabletop” size “tree” by periodic (not frequent) pruning. This plant is 26” tall from the base of the planter to the top of the foliage.

It has been a low maintenance plant, including watering (by sub-irrigation) and pruning. It has always been indoors, never outside.

It is growing in Supersoil, which is readily available at retail in the Western states. The soil has never been changed or amended. It is straight out of the bag.

Average light level has been in the range of 100 to 400 foot-candles of light in a southeast facing window in my office.

Because it is growing in adequate light (measured with a foot-candle meter), it is fertilized with Dyna-gro liquid Pro-Series 9-3-6 on a constant feed basis (1/2 tsp/gallon of water).

RU A Flickr Tagr?

The slickest service we’ve seen for photo display on the web is Flickr. Jump in with a free Flickr account and find out about the power of tagging. There are not many photos tagged with houseplant or houseplants.

There is also a indoor plants pool group of photos. Here are the top posters to this pool.

You can see that tagging is by no means an exact science by scanning through the palm photos. Palm means everything from the botanical to place names like Palm Beach and Palm Springs with lots in between. Some tags are puzzling to say the least. What were they thinking?

What A House

Here's another interesting and well written article by Denise Cowie of the Philadelphia Inquirer online. What a beautiful conservatory house this is.

Be sure to view the slide show. We wish there were even more photos.

 

Plant A Lamp

Pinch a leaf. Turn it on . Pinch a leaf. Turn it off.

And you thought you had everything. Jeff Page who sent us this link now has almost everything.

Tropical Sandusky

A while back, we discovered America in Bloom and thought it had good PR potential for interior plantscapers to be involved.

This isn't about an interior plantscaper. It's about Sandusky, Ohio being a part time tropical plant maintainer, outdoor landscaper and an America in Bloom award winner.

They deserve extra degree of difficulty points in the competition for doing what they do in their climate. Neat! Way to go Sandusky.

Residential Interiorscaping

Here’s a story about residential interior plantscaping written by Margaret Roach, editor-in-chief, and gardening editor of Martha Stewart Living magazine.

How much more valuable this would be if it included information about sub-irrigation. Imagine watering these plants by drench and drain methods. What a potential mess on the floor. What a hassle.

Sub-irrigation, of course, is a watertight method. There's little or no exposure to water damage to the floor. A bi-weekly schedule of watering all of the plants at the same time would keep them in fine shape.

We believe ASID-type interior designers, along with busy householders, would be happy with this.

Pothos Portage

This is what drives ASID-type interior designers nuts about "houseplants". The misspelling of Pothos as 'pathos' is appropriate in this case.

Utah State University Extension officials orchestrated the carefully choreographed move Monday of the potted plant with 350 feet of leafy vines from their old office in the Historic County Courthouse to the county Administration Building next door.

The golden pathos started out as a small house plant in an 8-inch pot, purchased by extension director Dean Miner for his office. Over the past six years, it grew and grew and grew. It grew out of his office and into the hall, eventually having vines stretching through the whole office.

Less is more!

Make Your Peace Lily Really Peaceful

With a Ka-on (“Flower Sound” in Japanese) you can listen to Enya’s Orinoco Flow through your Peace Lily. What you inhale while listening is your business.

We don’t make this stuff up. Let’s Corp, a telecommunications company in Nagoya, Japan developed a machine you can hook up to your houseplant or flower vase and listen to music through the petals and leaves. Is that cool, or what?

For you Integrated Pest Management folks, they claim it will keep bugs off plants. This could open up a completely new method of IPM for hotels and shopping malls. Think about it. Do you hear the music coming from that contented looking Bird of Paradise over there? Notice!—no mealy bugs or scale.

Marcel Vogel, a colleague from our IBM days, would love this if he were still with us. He was a contributor to "The Secret Life of Plants". We well remember the reaction in our office when publicity about Marcel and the book hit the wire services and radio news. Big Blue wasn't quite ready for metaphysical Marcel at the time. Woo hoo!

Aeroponics and now shall we dare say "audioponics" all in the same week. You can be sure we’ll follow both of them.

No Window In Your SOHO?

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps your home office doesn’t have a window and you would like to have some decorative plants.

No, you do not need to call a contractor. Just create a "window" with a fluorescent light. Look at the photo and think “replica window” rather than shelf.

This is not a staged photo. These plants live and grow here. This is their permanent home.

There are two phases of “replica window” light. This is the “moonlight” phase. Please overlook our amateur photography. We shot during the day with both natural and artificial light so that you can see the details. The "moonlight" is supplied by one low cost incandescent up-light.

The “daylight” phase is horticultural light supplied by one 4-foot fluorescent light. This one has a diamond pattern plastic diffuser. It could also be an ordinary shop light with no diffuser.

Both lamps are connected to timers so there’s no hassle involved in switching from “moonlight” to “daylight”. The light switches automatically.

Water is supplied by sub-irrigation. There is no need for special "plant lights". This is not indoor gardening but rather interior plant display for decorative purposes and to bring a bit of the outdoors inside.

Offer: Send us digital photos of your office and we will be pleased to help you design a "replica window".

Cool Greenhouse Window

We just received a Costco.com newsletter and searched their site for “houseplant” information. We didn’t find any consumer support info but we did find this cool looking greenhouse window. No, we don’t have one, but it looks like a good product at a very competitive price.

If anyone has one of these, please let us know your experience with it.

We are well aware of this display-shelving bargain since we have four of these chrome finish units. This is one of the best plant display bargains we know of. We noted that this online unit has 4 shelves. The local in-store model has 6 shelves for the same price. Perhaps this is to reduce the shipping cost.

As you can see in our office plant lab photo, we install 4 foot fluorescent shop lights both vertically and horizontally. We make hanging hardware from wire coat hangers. Check out what comparable size “light stands” cost on the web. Sheesh!