Orchids Evolve to Lure Pollinators

Orchids, like humans, use their lips to attract and entice others, and now new research finds that intense competition underlies their formation and constant changes.

Two competing groups of proteins are engaged in an evolutionary war that helps to explain why orchids are so beguiling and come in many different shapes and sizes, according to a new study published in the latest issue of the journal Nature Plants.

An orchid lip is important because "it acts as a landing pad or serves as a platform for potential pollinators, such as insects, moths and butterflies,"  Read the whole article here...

The "come hither" look of orchids, such as this member of the genus Phalaenopsis, ties with their attractive appearance.

Interested in Orchids for your workspace? Let Everything Grows create your indoor garden.  Selecting the right plants for your office environment is our specialty. Contact us today for a complimentary site visit and design consultation. 

Floating Flower Garden

This exhibit features 2,300 orchids suspended individually above the floor.  The orchids rise at your approach to form a tunnel of blossoms wherever you walk.  

The artist, teamLab, used motion sensors to create the effect.

See the video on teamlab's website.

Let Everything Grows create your indoor garden.  Selecting the right plants for your office environment is our specialty. Contact us today for a complimentary site visit and design consultation. 

Lobby Comes to Life

This recent new indoor plant installation really helped brighten the lobby of this office building in Silicon Valley. In this interior landscape design, we chose plants with varied textures and colors in sizes that stood up to the substantial size of the lobby. A succulent bowl placed on the lobby table completes the design by tying in the large, free standing plants with the furniture.

At Everything Grows, Selecting the right plants for your office environment is our specialty. Contact us today for a complimentary site visit and design consultation and let us come up with an interior landscape that will meet most every budget!

Warm-Blooded Plants?!

"If you live in the Northeastern US, and you walk in the woods on spring mornings, you’re likely to see a skunk cabbage. Indeed, you might see a skunk cabbage growing while the snow is still on the ground. What you may not notice, unless you look closely, is that the snow around the skunk cabbage has melted. It’s not a spectacular sight, but around all of the skunk cabbages you see, there will be a small hole in the snow.

What’s happening here? Is the sun warming the darker plants and melting the snow? No. Actually, the phenomenon you’re seeing is called thermogenesis, and it’s a normal ability of the plant. Or to put it another way, the eastern skunk cabbage is warm-blooded. Its ability to generate heat enables it to grow and flower while the snow is still on the ground – even though the plant is not frost-resistant. The frost will never touch it."  Read more...

At Everything Grows, we work with indoor tropical plants that have to stay warm to live.  If our plants get anywhere near snow like the skunk cabbage pictured above, their fate would be much less photogenic.

Selecting the right plants for your office environment is our specialty. Contact us today for a complimentary site visit and design consultation.  Barring snow on the floors of your offices, we'll be able to come up with an interior landscape that will meet most every budget!

Oldest Known Flower Identified

A dinosaur-era freshwater plant from Spain has just been identified as the world’s oldest known flowering plant.

The plant Montsechia vidalii, described in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, has been dated to approximately 130 million years ago when dinosaurs were Earth’s dominant land animals.

The Cretaceous Period plant once grew abundantly in freshwater lakes in what are now mountainous regions in Spain. It slightly edges out another early flowering plant, China’s Archaefructus sinensis, as being the earliest known flower. Like Montsechia, Archaefructus was an aquatic species.

Read the complete article here... 

At Everything Grows, you do not have to worry about your plants getting old with our interior plant maintenance service and Guaranteed Replacement Program that provides a complete guarantee on all plants under contract. Your plants will be watered, fertilized, cleaned and trimmed on a set schedule by our professionally trained, uniformed technicians. Any office plant that loses its healthy, beautiful appearance will be replaced at no cost to you.