Happy Holidays!

Happy Holidays!
from the staff at Everything Grows.

To add some cheer to your holiday, here are a few photos of the amazing holiday trees made of tillandsias at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania:

Plants Feel Pain Too!

A team of researchers from Tel Aviv University have discovered that plants emit an ultrasonic scream when their stems are cut or if they have not been watered enough. The research was picked up the Daily Mail and published on December 9th. 

Here is a link to the article: Plants Feel Pain Too!

Here are a few excerpts from the article:

The researchers tested tomato plants and tobacco plants by depriving them of water and by cutting their stems and then recording their response with a microphone placed ten centimeters away.

In both cases, they found the plants began to emit ultrasonic sounds between 20 and 100 kilohertz, which they believed could convey their distress to other plants and organisms in the immediate vicinity.

When the researchers deprived each plant of water, the tomato plants emitted even more distress sounds, 35 in one hour, while the tobacco plants made 11.
The plants also seemed to respond with different intensities of sound to different sources of stress.

The team observed that tobacco plants let out a louder sound when they were deprived of water than when they had their stems cut.

Plants that had no immediate environmental threat or damage, released less than one ultrasonic sounds per hour.

The team believes that listening for different types of sound emitted by plants could help with precision agriculture and allow farmers to identify potential problems with the crops with less guess work.

Last year, another study found that some plants registered 'pain' after having their leaves plucked or even touched, which caused the release of a foul tasting chemical across their leaves, believed to ward off insects.

Are you office plants screaming for water and proper care? Contact Everything Grows for professional indoor plant care and make your plants happy!

Aroids on Steroids? $$$

Philodendron Hope Selloum

In the last few years, ariods (araceae) such as philodendron and monstera have become wildly popular and very much in demand.  Some specimens, especially in the larger sizes are hard to come by, so we sometimes have to go with a smaller plant or a substitute depending on availability.  It seems that the popularity is being driven by younger people who are seeing and posting these plants on Instagram.  This recent article in the New York times talks about house plant auctions and how much some of these plants and their cuttings are going for right now.

We thought you might enjoy the article:

 
How Much Would You Pay for a Houseplant?
(Four-figure price tags. Destination auctions. Yearslong wait-lists. Rare plant collectors aren’t messing around.)

Monstera Deliciosa

Are you ready for beautiful live tropical plants for your workspace located anywhere in the San Francisco Bay Area?  You do not have to attend an auction to get beautiful reasonably price specimens -- just contact Everything Grows for a complementary walk through and proposal for plants for your office or lobby.

Living Plant Room Dividers

Our Earth Wall product makes a great partition and noise dampener for open area style workspace.  The are great for directing traffic flow and for privacy.  They can be ordered with or without casters and can be easily reconfigured.

 

Are you ready make your open workspace more enjoyable with Earth Walls?  Everything Grows has a wide range of colors and sizes available. Contact us today for a complimentary site visit and design consultation and let us come up with an interior landscape for your workspace.

Happy Thanksgiving!

The staff at Everything Grows wishes you a happy and joyous Thanksgiving and that you  Enjoy the holiday with your family and friends!

Caught on camera in the Everything Grows Parking lot!

Are you thinking of plants in your office space?   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!

400,000 Plant Living Wall!

The design for a new office building in London lays out plans for what will be the largest living wall in Europe and will include 400,000 plants on a "living wall."

The "Living Wall" design concept by Sheppard Robson in London

 Architecture firm Shephard Robson have unveiled plans to cover a new building with “the largest living wall in Europe.”  The new building, Citicape House, will be constructed on the site of the newly-established Culture Mile in the City of London and will include office and event space, a hotel, restaurant and a publicly-accessible roof terrace.

The building will be wrapped in a façade made up of more than 400,000 plants. The façade will also incorporate a rainwater collection system that will irrigate the wall and reduce the need to pipe excess water to the site. At roof level, there will be spaces designed to help threatened native wildflower species to flourish.

The green wall is estimated to provide six tonnes of oxygen and will capture more than eight tonnes of CO2 from the air each year. This will be especially welcome, as the building is located in a heavily trafficked area. It will also help to mitigate the urban heat island effect, lowering the temperatures around the building by three to five degrees Celsius. The wall will also improve air quality by trapping approximately 500kg of particulate matter per year.

Read the original post

Contact Everything Grows today if you would like to add living plants to your workspace. We service the entire San Francisco Bay Area, with our expertly trained plant care technicians taking Amazing care of the plants in your facility.  

History of the Poinsettia

Joel Roberts Poinsett

The holidays are upon us and so is Poinsettia season.  We thought you might enjoy a brief history of the plant as well as care tips. 

Joel Roberts Poinsett came across the Poinsettia in the 1820s in Mexico while stationed there as US Ambassador.  Intrigued by the plant, he brought cuttings home cultivate on his farm in Greenville, North Carolina.  Because of its short bloom cycle over the holiday months, it became known as the Christmas flower and was named after him.


Poinsettias like to be in temperatures between 60 and 70 degrees Fahrenheit and like bright indirect light.  Keep them away from drafts either warm or cold.  They are thirsty plants that like lots of water and can go dry easily.  At the same time, you want to make sure the soil drains, because they will suffer if they are over watered too. Do not get water on the leaves or flowers -- it could cause spotting or rot. They are brittle plants -- brushing against them could damage the leaves, and bracts break off easily if bumped or not handled gently.  With proper care in a proper environment, the bloom will last up to 6 to 8 weeks.

Live Poinsettia

Let Everything Grows take care of your live indoor plant needs for your lobby or work space. We install custom designed decor and remove it when the season is over.  We service the entire San Francisco Bay Area, with our expertly trained plant care technicians taking Amazing care of the plants in your facility. 

Everything Grows Helping Others

For each new customer at Everything Grows we give back by making a donation and loan to a Kiva entrepreneur.   It is our way of sharing our success and helping someone else succeed as well.  Since 2007, We are celebrating our 293rd donation and loan this week in 68 different countries. See the people we have helped through Kiva.

Growing Cabbage and Vegetables in the Solomon Islands.

Farmer in Palestine

Dairy Farmer in Jordan

Kiva.org's mission is to give all people - even in the most remote areas of the globe - the power to create opportunity for themselves and others. We have found Kiva to be a great way to help support the entrepreneurial spirit throughout the world.  


Contact Everything Grows today if you would like to add living plants to your workspace. We service the entire San Francisco Bay Area, with our expertly trained plant care technicians taking Amazing care of the plants in your facility. 

Spotlight: Fiddle Leaf Fig

The Fiddle Leaf Fig also known as the Ficus Lyrata is one of the hottest plants on the market right now. Surely you have seen it in office buildings, commercials, or even in your own living room. They are a beautiful tree with large, dramatic leaves.

Here at Everything Grows, we are placing Fiddle Leaf Figs in new accounts almost weekly! Here are some photos of a couple that we just placed at a customer location in Fremont.

  

Are you ready for Fiddle Leaf Figs for your workspace? Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with lush living plants.

Halloween Succulent Pumpkin

Here's a great design idea for Halloween -- a pumpkin succulent bowl.

 It makes a beautiful centerpiece and is quite easy to do with the step-by-step guide to making the succulent pumpkin below:

Step 1: Purchase a Pumpkin. An ideal pumpkin has some character and some sort of depression at the top. Once you found a good one, remove as much of the stem as you can without cutting into the body of the pumpkin.

Step 2: Spray the top of the pumpkin with a glue gun and then add moss.

Step 3: Take succulent cuttings, remove the stems and glue them to the moss

foundation layer. Start at the center and work your way to the sides.

Step 4: Tuck a few more succulents and other interesting ornaments into the holes so that it is nice and full.  

Step 5: Enjoy the finished product. It should last a good 4-6 weeks without a problem. You don't even need to water anything.

Happy Halloween from the staff at Everything Grows Interior Landscaping!

Plant Walls

These large earth wall planter boxes containing the very geometric Sansevieria add great architectural elements to this lobby design. The white top dressing is a great addition to make the plants pop!

Are you ready for Earth Walls for your workspace? Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with

Are You Alive?

Green Plants for Green Buildings has recently produced some fun and informative "TedTalk 2025" videos that show the many benefits of indoor plants.  We have added our favorite to the bottom of the Everything Grows home page if you would like to see it.  

Here is a link to another great video that talks about how plants and nature make people feel alive: 

LIVINGPLANT™ Part 2: "How Did We Discover The Revolutionary Power of The LIVING PLANT?"


The video talks about a study showing that 72% of people do not know if they are alive in a sterile office environment where 90% of people feel alive in nature surrounded by plants.

This study strongly suggests that adding plants and natural features to workspace will make people feel more alive.

Here are some slides from the video:

 

Are you ready to start feeling alive in your office space?   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!

Spotlight: Aglaonema

The Aglaonema  comes in many varieties and can be both a smaller table top plant or a larger sized floor plant, albeit a short floor plant at 28-32 inches tall.  This is plant is tried and true for Everything Grows customers and can take the challenging lighting conditions of many indoor spaces in stride.

The Aglaonema made the NASA study's top 25 list of plants that clean the air because it 
produces oxygen from Carbon Dioxide and also absorbs harmful benzene, formaldehyde and/or trichloroethylene.

Here is a picture two of our favorite varieties of Agloanemas:

Aglaonema Silver Bay:

And the Aglaonema Tigress:

 

Are you ready for Aglaonemas for your workspace?   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!

Monstara Holey Leaves!

Philodendron Monstara

At Everything Grows we are always looking to find new and interesting tropical plants for your work space, we came across this Article on why plants might naturally have holes in their leaves:

Evolutionary biologist Christopher Muir has seen plenty of unusual vegetation while exploring tropical rainforests, from a foot-long flower to a plant that uses ants to protect itself. But it was in a hallway near his office at the University of the Balearic Islands in Spain that he spied something truly memorable: a holey houseplant, Monstera deliciosa, also known as the Swiss cheese plant for the large holes that punctuate its leaves. The plant immediately struck Muir (a distant relative of famed naturalist John Muir) as odd because plants need to maximize surface area to absorb as much sunlight as possible. They can do this by either having lots of small leaves, or fewer large ones.

Why, Muir wondered, would this large-leafed plant punch windows in its foliage? Searching for a plausible evolutionary explanation, he considered where the plant naturally grows: in thick tropical forests, clinging to the trunks of trees about midway between ground and canopy. Might the holes somehow help Monstera capture the sparse, dappled sunlight that filters down through the thick trees?  

Muir proposed to solve the puzzle by creating a mathematical model that captures the relationship between a leaf's shape, size and ability to intercept stray glints of sunlight that filter through the canopy. He saw that surface area wasn't everything: By extending a leaf's overall size while keeping living, energy-greedy matter to a minimum, the plant increases the odds that at least some of the splotchy sunlight will strike each leaf.

It's a smart strategy. "If you have some resources you're going to allocate to make a leaf, you can make it smaller but completely filled in, or make windows and take up a larger area," Muir says. "If light is relatively random, it makes sense to spread the leaf area you have ... to give you more chances to intercept those sun flecks.

The article above came from the April 2014 issue of Discovery Magazine 
http://discovermagazine.com/2014/april/2-o-holey-leaf

By the way, the Philodendron Monstara has become wildly popular this past year, to the point where we are having troubles finding larger specimens.

Are you ready for beautiful live plants to warm up your workspace such as the Monstara?   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!
 

Indoor Plants Around The World

Below are some photos of indoor plant placements found around the world:

Australia

Australia

Austria

Canada

Great Britain

Great Britain

The Netherlands

You do not need to travel around the world to get beautiful plants for your office right here in the San Francisco Bay Area.   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!

Plants Help Open Floor Plan

Open floor office space with polished concrete floors is very popular but can be noisy and feel a little cold.  Selecting the right locations and mix of live indoor plants can really warm up the modern office environment with the added benefit of filtering the air and absorbing noise.  Plants make great room dividers and are smartly placed against large glass panels to prevent people from accidentally walking into the window.

This plant helped keep people from accidentally running into the glass wall

This earth wall rectangle provides some boundary to the sitting area in this office

Are you ready for plants to warm up your workspace?   Contact Everything Grows today to have one of our in-house designers visit your office for a complimentary consultation and design proposal to help make your space come alive with plants!