Year: 2016

By Megan McDonough (from The Washington Post)

It should come as no surprise that plants play a vital role in maintaining our atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen through the well-known process of photosynthesis. (Thanks, high school earth science class.)

But certain plant varieties go a step further by reducing airborne toxins, including carbon monoxide, formaldehyde and benzene, from the air we breathe in our homes and offices.

“With all the synthetic building components and furnishings found within a modern building, there usually exist myriad chemicals in the indoor air,” B.C. “Bill” Wolverton, an environmental engineer and retired senior research scientist at NASA , said in an email. While at NASA, he was the principal investigator of the Clean Air Study, which discovered that certain houseplants had the ability to remove airborne chemicals and help purify the air in space stations.

Many household items, such as carpets, draperies and stoves, contain pollutants, and lots of commonly used goods, including glue, detergent, grocery bags, toilet paper and even facial wipes, emit toxic compounds.

“These chemicals are often found in low levels but combine to produce a chemical soup,” Wolverton said.

That doesn’t sound very appetizing.

Prolonged exposure to these pollutants, such as formaldehyde, can lead to health problems such as sore throats, scratchy eyes and nosebleeds, and long-term, serious ailments, including decreased lung function and an increased risk of asthma and cancer, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry.

Luckily for us, several common houseplants double as natural air purifiers, efficiently and effectively absorbing and filtering out toxic agents from our indoor air. With winter on the horizon (and the Environmental Protection Agency’s estimation that Americans spend on average a whopping 93 percent of their lives indoors), it’s a great time to consider investing in one of these detoxifying plants.

We asked Wolverton, author of “How to Grow Fresh Air: 50 House Plants That Purify Your Home or Office” and “Plants: Why You Can’t Live Without Them,” to provide his top recommendations for houseplants that are readily available, easy to maintain and efficient at cleaning the air in your home.

• Lady palm – An adaptable, green plant known for its fan-shaped foliage, the lady palm can thrive in dry or humid environments, requires little sunlight and is resistant to pests. If you have pets, this might be your best bet, as it’s the only one on Wolverton’s list that is nontoxic to animals. (The others should be kept out of reach.) It filters out formaldehyde, xylene, toluene and ammonia.
• Rubber plant – The rugged rubber plant does well in dim lighting, prefers humid conditions, and is resistant to pests and diseases. The easy-to-grow plant, known for its large, glossy green leaves, also absorbs toxins such as formaldehyde, ­xylene and toluene from the air.
• Golden pathos – Commonly displayed as a hanging plant, this fast-growing vine, distinguishable by its heart-shaped, gold-tinted leaves, can survive in low lighting and thrives in colder temperatures (great for chilly offices). It also fights nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and formaldehyde.
• Peace lily – With its lance-shaped leaves and striking white blossoms, these shade-loving evergreen plants will brighten any home or office while also ridding the air of acetone, ammonia, benzene, formaldehyde, trichloroethylene, xylene and toluene.
• Snake plant – This perennial is a great pick for first-time plant owners, as it requires little sunlight or maintenance to keep it alive. Known for its textured, upright, swordlike leaves, the potted plant also filters formaldehyde, xylene and toluene.

As a rule, Wolverton recommends one plant per 100 square feet of home or office space, provided there isn’t a serious indoor air quality problem. He also recommends a mixture of houseplant varieties, as plants have different affinities for various toxins. At his home, he displays 12 plant varieties, with 25 to 30 plants indoors at any given time.

Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/home/these-five-plants-dont-just-look-good–they-improve-your-health-too/2016/11/07/2e0685ae-a140-11e6-8832-23a007c77bb4_story.html

Welcome to PLANTZ.com!  It’s been an interesting road to get here, but we’re up…marketing, selling, and shipping some of the world’s finest foliage plants.  We hope it’s going to make some people really happy.

Back in April 2011, the brother of a Tampa friend moved to Manhattan to live the bachelor life in NYC.  We’ll call him Robby, mainly because that’s his real name.  Robby was the only Manhattanite I knew, and I wanted to see if I could get a plant to him – a nice one, to brighten his studio apartment.  A bigger and better one than he could get anywhere in the city.  So, I commandeered one of my favorite palms – a Hawaiian-grown Kentia palm – sleeved it, boxed it, and sent it to Robby.

It was our first shot, and darned if it didn’t work.

We gave care instructions to Robby, told him about the wonderful sub-irrigation system and, checked on it from time to time, but Robby’s enthusiasm for the little oxygen producer waned.  I lost track of Robby, and I know he killed the plant within a year.

Another try.

Business in Tampa continued going well – we serve over 400 customers, some of the most high-profile companies in the market.  Our service technicians manage thousands of plants in all kinds of environments, even some growing on walls.  Additionally, around Thanksgiving every year most of our team puts on elf hats and delivers and installs Christmas and holiday decorations.  Over 4,000 Poinsettias pass through our shop, and we do both live and silk holiday greenery.  There’s something really special about the smell of a Fraser Fir at Christmastime.

Journeys

In the summer of 2014, a couple things happened: I took a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii and I got a call from Cleveland.  The trip to the Big Island was an eye-opener and I got a better understanding for the value of Hawaiian grown foliage (besides being a nice get-away for my wife Lynn and me).  My favorite palm is grown there – the one Robby killed – and I wrote about it in The Journey of the Kentia Palm.  Back in Tampa, we got a call from a woman in Ohio who wanted to send a gift plant – but not a little one.  She wanted a nice, tall plant for her grandson who had just opened a new retail store.  And so it started – the Lisa’s triumphant trip to Cleveland was our first commercial endeavor into what we call around here – “plants by mail”, or “PBM” for short.  I wrote back then, too, of The Journey of the Lisa Cane – must have listened to Don’t Stop Believing a few times that summer.

The move.

A couple other things came together.  We had recently relocated in Tampa from a less than half-acre rented facility just north of Tampa’s swanky Hyde Park area to a 2.5 acre piece of property we were able to buy, complete with greenhouses and deep wells, out by the Fairgrounds.  It’s a little further from the action in Tampa, but the space, greenhouses, and water afforded us the ability to carry a little more inventory – maybe even keep a few extra plants around in case we got another “Cleveland” call.  That, together with my always-encouraging team under lead cheerleader Sue Waltzer, who kept pushing and pushing me to pursue the “PBM” thing.

Web guys and dot coms.

We’ve been working for many years now with Barry Powers (my “Web Guy”) and his marketing team at PowerOn Marketing.  They’ve helped us solidify our plantz.us address as a go-to spot for anyone who wants office plants, plant rentals, or a plant wall in west central Florida.  He held our hands through some really bad (self-imposed) SEO moves, and fixed it for us too.  Over the years, I’ll bet we talked a thousand times about building out our site so we could sell plants online.  “I’m not ready”, “I don’t have enough time”, “my tux didn’t come back from the cleaners” – I was full of excuses.  But with additional inventory capacity, abundant sources for high-quality plants, and some confidence shipping them, we started building the site earlier this year.

Back when we decided to brand the company as PLANTZ, we bought plantz.us, and settled in on using it.  I loved saying, “dot U-S, like in United States”, but it still wasn’t a .com.  For years I’ve stalked plantz.com – watching its owners move it, hide it, use it to redirect to other “plant” sites, and ultimately try to auction it.  It was held in some Bahamian corporation and there was no way to make an offer, no way to talk to someone on the phone and sell them on why they should give it to me for a couple hundred bucks.  Ha!  GoDaddy couldn’t even help.  It surfaced in late spring and was offered for sale on an auction site, and I just couldn’t stomach the thought of someone else getting “my” .com; so, after a few beers over Memorial Day weekend, I pressed the “buy” button and after several days of transfers – domain and money – we are now the proud owners of plantz.com and we hope it will gain national recognition as the go-to online spot for the best foliage plants in the world.

We’re open.

So, with a few IP entries, plantz.com is now open!  And we hope to make you happy with a fabulous plant.  And we’re not stopping here because we have three main goals for the site:

1. Help you select a plant that will best work for you.
2. Deliver it to your doorstep.
3. Give you confidence you can keep it alive.

We’ve started with ten plants – well, it’s down to nine because one didn’t make the cut.  The plants are all high-quality shade-grown plants hand-picked by me from growers I trust.  They are the best foliage plants available anywhere.  We plan to add plants to the site – maybe a new one that we’ll feature each month and some planters too.  And we’ll keep adding content and “how to” care tips along the way – using images and video to give you the best shot at maintaining your favorite plant.

Let me know what you think, and how we can make plantz.com even better.

As green as I need to be,

 

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Stanford
President

Welcome to PLANTZ.com!  It’s been an interesting road to get here, but we’re up…marketing, selling, and shipping some of the world’s finest foliage plants.  We hope it’s going to make some people really happy.

Back in April 2011, the brother of a Tampa friend moved to Manhattan to live the bachelor life in NYC.  We’ll call him Robby, mainly because that’s his real name.  Robby was the only Manhattanite I knew, and I wanted to see if I could get a plant to him – a nice one, to brighten his studio apartment.  A bigger and better one than he could get anywhere in the city.  So, I commandeered one of my favorite palms – a Hawaiian-grown Kentia palm – sleeved it, boxed it, and sent it to Robby.

It was our first shot, and darned if it didn’t work.

We gave care instructions to Robby, told him about the wonderful sub-irrigation system and, checked on it from time to time, but Robby’s enthusiasm for the little oxygen producer waned.  I lost track of Robby, and I know he killed the plant within a year.

Another try.

Business in Tampa continued going well – we serve over 400 customers, some of the most high-profile companies in the market.  Our service technicians manage thousands of plants in all kinds of environments, even some growing on walls.  Additionally, around Thanksgiving every year most of our team puts on elf hats and delivers and installs Christmas and holiday decorations.  Over 4,000 Poinsettias pass through our shop, and we do both live and silk holiday greenery.  There’s something really special about the smell of a Fraser Fir at Christmastime.

Journeys

In the summer of 2014, a couple things happened: I took a trip to the Big Island of Hawaii and I got a call from Cleveland.  The trip to the Big Island was an eye-opener and I got a better understanding for the value of Hawaiian grown foliage (besides being a nice get-away for my wife Lynn and me).  My favorite palm is grown there – the one Robby killed – and I wrote about it in The Journey of the Kentia Palm.  Back in Tampa, we got a call from a woman in Ohio who wanted to send a gift plant – but not a little one.  She wanted a nice, tall plant for her grandson who had just opened a new retail store.  And so it started – the Lisa’s triumphant trip to Cleveland was our first commercial endeavor into what we call around here – “plants by mail”, or “PBM” for short.  I wrote back then, too, of The Journey of the Lisa Cane – must have listened to Don’t Stop Believing a few times that summer.

The move.

A couple other things came together.  We had recently relocated in Tampa from a less than half-acre rented facility just north of Tampa’s swanky Hyde Park area to a 2.5 acre piece of property we were able to buy, complete with greenhouses and deep wells, out by the Fairgrounds.  It’s a little further from the action in Tampa, but the space, greenhouses, and water afforded us the ability to carry a little more inventory – maybe even keep a few extra plants around in case we got another “Cleveland” call.  That, together with my always-encouraging team under lead cheerleader Sue Waltzer, who kept pushing and pushing me to pursue the “PBM” thing.

Web guys and dot coms.

We’ve been working for many years now with Barry Powers (my “Web Guy”) and his marketing team at PowerOn Marketing.  They’ve helped us solidify our plantz.us address as a go-to spot for anyone who wants office plants, plant rentals, or a plant wall in west central Florida.  He held our hands through some really bad (self-imposed) SEO moves, and fixed it for us too.  Over the years, I’ll bet we talked a thousand times about building out our site so we could sell plants online.  “I’m not ready”, “I don’t have enough time”, “my tux didn’t come back from the cleaners” – I was full of excuses.  But with additional inventory capacity, abundant sources for high-quality plants, and some confidence shipping them, we started building the site earlier this year.

Back when we decided to brand the company as PLANTZ, we bought plantz.us, and settled in on using it.  I loved saying, “dot U-S, like in United States”, but it still wasn’t a .com.  For years I’ve stalked plantz.com – watching its owners move it, hide it, use it to redirect to other “plant” sites, and ultimately try to auction it.  It was held in some Bahamian corporation and there was no way to make an offer, no way to talk to someone on the phone and sell them on why they should give it to me for a couple hundred bucks.  Ha!  GoDaddy couldn’t even help.  It surfaced in late spring and was offered for sale on an auction site, and I just couldn’t stomach the thought of someone else getting “my” .com; so, after a few beers over Memorial Day weekend, I pressed the “buy” button and after several days of transfers – domain and money – we are now the proud owners of plantz.com and we hope it will gain national recognition as the go-to online spot for the best foliage plants in the world.

We’re open.

So, with a few IP entries, plantz.com is now open!  And we hope to make you happy with a fabulous plant.  And we’re not stopping here because we have three main goals for the site:

1. Help you select a plant that will best work for you.
2. Deliver it to your doorstep.
3. Give you the confidence that you can keep it alive.

We’ve started with ten plants – well, it’s down to nine because one didn’t make the cut.  The plants are all high-quality shade-grown plants hand-picked by me from growers I trust.  They are the best foliage plants available anywhere.  We plan to add plants to the site – maybe a new one that we’ll feature each month and some planters too.  And we’ll keep adding content and “how to” care tips along the way – using images and video to give you the best shot at maintaining your favorite plant.

Let me know what you think, and how we can make plantz.com even better.

As green as I need to be,

 

 

 

 

 

Steve Stanford
President