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!

Indoor Plants Hand Selected

Everything Grows hand selects the best grade A commercial quality plants available for you.  Here are photos of a trip to one of our nurseries:

 

Are you considering lush live beautiful plants 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!

Brighten Your Workspace

These bold yellow containers were the perfect choice for this modern office building lobby. 

Oversized plants and containers were needed to fill out this beautiful large lobby area

We have containers in all shapes and sizes, and most importantly, BOLD colors.  Is your accent color cobalt blue, or bright orange?  We have just about every color you could want.

 

Are you ready for new bold colors in 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 in bold colorful containers. 

New Plants for Oakland Site

The Everything Grows team installed beautiful new plants and custom containers for a condominium in Oakland this week and it looks fabulous!  See the photos below to see how it turned out. The plants really put the finishing touch on the space.  The white mid century modern containers with wooden stands are particularly popular right now.

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

Succulents, Wood, and Glass

This was a fun project for the Everything Grows indoor plant design team in this downtown San Francisco lobby.  The built-in terrarium is stunning in the natural wood, stone and glass surroundings.

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