We have just finished our Easter and Passover floral collection and just went live. We have sourced bulbs and other various flowers from around the world. Shop our website for all the total collection.
House Plants to Cure Insomnia
CommentJasmine
This exotic plant has a gentle, soothing effect on the body and mind. It has been shown in one study to reduce anxiety levels, leading to a greater quality of sleep.
Not only that, but this research suggests that the positive effects of such a high quality sleep lead you enjoy increased alertness and productivity during the day.
With such beautiful pink or ivory blossoms, there seem to be no downsides to adding a Jasmine bloom to your bedroom
Lavender
Who doesn’t love the scent of lavender? It’s also probably the most well-known of all plants when it comes to inducing sleep and reducing anxiety levels. Research backs up these claims, with lavender scents shown to slow down heart rate, lower blood pressure and levels of stress.
In one study, the smell of lavender reduced crying in babies, sending them into a deeper sleep; while simultaneously reducing stress in both mother and child – something all new mothers will be happy to hear!
In women, lavender has been shown to increase light sleep, and decrease rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep and the amount of time to wake after first falling asleep, with opposite effects in men.
While there are a host of lavender scented products on the market to help you get a full night’s rest (from scented sleep masks to lavender mattresses) why not go for the most natural and cost effective option – a beautiful lavender plant placed on your nightstand.
Snake Plant
One of the most recommended plants for improving indoor air quality, the Snake Plant is a hardy and easy to care-for plant … always a plus!
What’s great about this plant is that it emits oxygen at night time whilst simultaneously taking in carbon dioxide – something we naturally produce when breathing. All this leads to a purer quality of air and a better night’s sleep.
The Snake Plant also filters some nasty but common household toxins (namely formaldehyde, trichloroethylene and benzene) from the air.
Aloe Vera
Listed as one of NASA’s top air-improving plants, the fantastic Aloe works much like the Snake Plant – it emits oxygen at night, making for a more restful slumber. It’s also one of the easiest plants to grow and maintain – it tolerates ‘neglect’ well and so doesn’t require frequent watering.
Dubbed the ‘plant of immortality’ by the Egyptians, it reproduces easily so if you buy one you’ll soon have an Aloe plant for all the rooms in your house. You can even pass on the gift of happy sleep to your family and friends! Keep it on your bedroom window as it does need a lot of direct sunlight.
You can also use the gel from the Aloe Vera leaves as a topical treatment for minor cuts and burns, insect bites, dry skin and lots more! It’s simply a must-have plant in every home.
Happy First Day Of Spring!
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Although it may not look or feel like Spring, today marks the first day of Spring and tomorrow we will be getting a foot of snow. Go figure! With warm weather fast approaching our floral and garden designers are finishing up our spring collection line. We will be offering numerous spring bulbs in fresh cut arrangements as well as European gardens. These should be going live online with in the next 36 hours.
St. Patrick's Day Flowers!
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St. Patrick's Day is a celebration of Irish and Irish American culture throughout the United States and Ireland, celebrations include parades and huge displays of the color green, in Chicago they dye the river green!
Decorate your St. Paddy's Day party with emerald green flowers!
Ever wondered why people pinch you for not wearing green on St. Patrick's Day? Wearing green symbolizes the Irish identity and to make up for the past when they could have been hanged for wearing green or speaking Gaelic. During Ireland rule under the English, Irish people were not allowed to wear the color green, as the color represented Ireland. Now, everyone is "Irish" for the day and we wear green in support.
Have a St. Paddy's Day bouquet delivered to celebrate the luck of the Irish
St. Patrick’s Day flowers are a great way to celebrate the holiday, along with the corned beef and cabbage and a Guinness of course! Vibrant arrangements of green flowers are the perfect St. Patrick’s Day decorations. Although it might be hard to find shamrock or a four-leaf clover this St. Paddy’s Day, an arrangement of green orchids or roses tied with a green ribbon will lend the same festive spirit to your St. Patrick's Day party.
Many forget that today is a religious observance. It has become the norm, to wear foam hats in the shape of shamrock, "Kiss Me, I'm Irish" buttons, to dance all-night to Irish music (fueled by copious amounts of green beer!). Fr. Vincent Twomey, an Irish Catholic priest, expressed concern about the secularization of St. Patrick's Day. He said, "It is time to reclaim St. Patrick's Day as a church festival." He questioned the need for "mindless alcohol-fueled revelry" and concluded that "it is time to bring the piety and the fun together."
We wish the luck of the Irish to you all and that you discover a leprechaun and a pot-of-gold at the end of a rainbow! Here is an Irish blessing just for you...
- May the road rise up to meet you.
- May the sun shine warm upon your face,
- And rains fall soft upon your fields.
- And until we meet again,
- May God hold you in the palm of His hand.
Millennials and their love for plants!
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When Summer Rayne Oakes’s roommate moved out of their apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, she was left with more than just a vacant bedroom.
“All of a sudden the apartment felt so cold and empty,” said Ms. Oakes, 33. “I needed to find a way to make the space feel warm and full of life again.”
Her solution? A fiddle leaf fig tree; the first of nearly 700 houseplants — spanning 400 species — that Ms. Oakes, founder of Homestead Brooklyn, would eventually buy for her 1,200-square-foot apartment.
Her indoor forest features everything from a subirrigated living wall in her bedroom, which is a wall of greenery that is essentially a self-watering planter with a built-in reservoir; a vertical garden made out of Mason jars mounted to the living-room wall with wooden boards and hose clamps; and a closet-turned-kitchen grow garden with edible plants (ranging from herbs and greens to pineapple plants and curry leaves).
“I didn’t set out to build a jungle,” Ms. Oakes said. “I just saw how much energy and life the plants brought to the space and kept going.”
It’s a sentiment that more and more young people seem to be echoing in their own apartments. Wellness-minded millennials, especially ones in large urban environments that lack natural greenery, are opting to fill their voids — both decorative and emotional — with houseplants.
“Millennials were responsible for 31 percent of houseplant sales in 2016,” according to Ian Baldwin, a business adviser for the gardening industry. The 2016 National Gardening survey found that of the six million Americans who took up gardening that year, five million were ages 18 to 34. “This group has more college debt and as a result, are renting homes instead of buying,” Mr. Baldwin said. “Houseplants are a low-cost way to have a green space at home.”
Summer Rayne Oakes has created a vertical garden in her dining room that is made out of Mason jars mounted to the wall with wooden boards and hose clamps.CreditBrad Dickson for The New York Times
Meanwhile, Greenery NYC, a botanic design company, has increased its clientele by 6,500 percent since it was founded in 2010; developers are finding ways to include gardens as an amenity for residents; and more people — like Ms. Oakes — are turning what little spare space they have in their apartments into indoor gardens.
“Our sales have doubled each year,” said Rebecca Bullene, the founder of Greenery NYC. “And I attribute that mostly to businesses that want to attract millennial talent and millennials themselves who want more nature in their lives.”
Inside her 1,800-square-foot apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, Ms. Bullene, 37, cares for over a hundred plants. She has installed a green divider wall — a six-foot-by-six-foot steel shelving unit filled with a dozen wooden planter boxes and over 50 plants — that separates her living room from her in-home office, as well as a terrarium and several other large-scale plants, including an 11-foot-tall Ficus Audrey tree, to help break up the open layout of the space.
But for Ms. Bullene, the plants do more than help define the apartment; they make her home healthier, too. “Plants boost serotonin levels and dissolve volatile airborne chemicals,” she said. “They actually make healthier spaces for humans to inhabit.” She cited a 2010 study from Washington State University that breaks down the benefits of indoor plants, including cleaner air and lowered stress levels.
Along with her floor-to-ceiling plant divider wall in the living room, she also employed a combination of plants that release oxygen at night in her bedroom — including aloe vera and sansevieria — so that she and her husband can breathe cleaner air while they sleep.
Millennial-minded companies are also going to great lengths to integrate greenery into their offices.
The Etsy headquarters in Dumbo, Brooklyn, for example, could easily be mistaken for an indoor botanical garden. Spanning nine floors and over 200,000 square feet, the office is home to more than 11,000 plants, including dozens of large-scale plant displays and living walls installed and maintained by Ms. Bullene and Greenery NYC.
“Every employee has a sight line to greenery,” said Hilary Young, Etsy’s sustainability manager, who helps the company seek ways to conserve the environment. “It’s a beautiful space that inspires and boosts productivity.” Greenery NYC and the architects at Gensler worked closely to create a state-of-the-art rainwater-harvesting and irrigation system at Etsy’s headquarters, which is considered the largest commercial “living building” in the world. It allows all the office plants to be watered with recycled storm water.
A line of cascading vines frames a conference room at the TED Talks headquarters in TriBeCa.CreditBrad Dickson for The New York Times
The roofs of the headquarters and a few of the neighboring buildings are outfitted with large gutters that collect and distribute rainwater to a 7,300-gallon cistern on the eighth floor of the Etsy building. From there, the water is dispersed through tubes to each floor of the building to water the plants.
“We wanted a space that bettered the lives of our employees,” Ms. Young said, “and that made a social and environmental impact outside of the office.”
And at the TED Talks headquarters in TriBeCa, Greenery NYC installed a series of unique plant displays throughout the two-floor office. Along with over 25 linear feet of boxed planters in the entrance lobby, the 50,000-square-foot office is filled with cascading vines, wall-mounted shelf planters, green dividers, and even desks outfitted with built-in planters, ensuring employees unlimited opportunities to take in a bit of nature throughout the workday.
“I love that when I look up from my work, all I see is green,” said Katie Hawley, 28, a senior editor at Etsy, who also keeps houseplants at home. “I feel happier just looking at them.”
With the increasing number of young people searching for access to greenery in their residences, real estate developers have also jumped on the trend.
At the ARC in Long Island City — a new 428-unit “industrial-inspired” luxury rental building developed by the Lightstone Group — residents have access to a 1,100-square-foot glass greenhouse, where they are free to plant and grow their own vegetables and herbs. “It’s been a tremendous selling point to prospective tenants,” said Scott Avram, senior vice president of development at Lightstone.
“One factor of my decision to rent in the ARC was the beautiful courtyard and greenhouse,” said Greg Garunov, 33. “There is something to having a green oasis at your fingertips in the steel city of New York.”
And over at the Margo, in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, residents enjoy a living wall in the lobby as well as a rooftop garden with plots that tenants can adopt for their own gardens.
“Wellness is a priority for our millennial-aged residents,” said Dave Maundrell, executive vice president of new developments for Brooklyn and Queens at Citi Habitats. “They’re willing to pay more for access to a green space.”
But for those young urbanites who don’t have the luxury of a communal garden or greenhouse, houseplants remain an affordable, and renter-friendly option.
For instance, Ms. Oakes has managed to make the bulk of her indoor garden self-regulating and, perhaps more impressively, removable.
Thanks to several DIY irrigation systems she hacked throughout her home, including two irrigation units she created using a 150-foot hose that connects to pipes under her kitchen sink, Ms. Oakes said she has to spend only about a half-hour a day tending to her plants.
And to avoid leaks to the apartment below, Ms. Oakes reinforced her bedroom wall with plywood and then added metal gutters to collect any excess water before hanging up her vertical garden.
Ms. Bullene, a renter, also took care to ensure that all of her subirrigated plant systems — even the self-regulating terrarium and self-watering plant wall — are removable.
“All of the plant systems can come with us if we ever move,” Ms. Bullene said. “It’s as easy as unplugging them and removing a couple of screws.”
Ms. Oakes said that even though plant care might seem like a whole lot of work, the effort is worth it.
“New York City is tough,” she said. “My plants gave me a sanctuary to come home to.”
Story can be read here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/09/realestate/plant-loving-millennials-at-home-and-at-work.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FFlowers%20and%20Plants&action=click&contentCollection=science®ion=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=2&pgtype=collection
Boston Flower & Garden Show!
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he Boston Flower & Garden Show is about inspiring, educating and motivating the region’s gardeners. Whether for curb appeal, backyard, kitchen, indoor, rooftop or community gardens, this is where New England’s green lovers go to discover new ideas while having fun with family and friends.
This March, as winter wanes, the Boston Flower & Garden Show’s designers, exhibitors and marketplace vendors will whet your appetite for the sumptuous joys of the season ahead. Colorful life-sized gardens, intricate floral arrangements, informative lectures and demonstrations and exciting special events will incorporate elements of the popular food gardening trend. Learn about organics, small-space gardens, homesteading hobbies, edibles as ornamentals and family-friendly spaces for outdoor dining and entertaining. Enjoy the first taste of Spring while gathering the recipes and ingredients you’ll need for this year’s successful garden.
CLOSED MARCH 13TH DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATER
CommentDue to tomorrows impeding snow storm we will be closed March 13th. See you on the 14th.
Sean
California Grower Gives Out 100,000 Tulips.
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All around Union Square in downtown San Francisco last Saturday there were smiles, tears — even a marriage proposal — and there were thousands and thousands of bright, beautiful tulips, free for the taking.
In honor of “American Tulip Day,” the Sun Valley Group in Arcata, California, collaborated with Dutch partners Anthos and iBulb to hand out 100,000 tulips to surprised (and delighted) residents and tourists. The giveaway, modeled after similar efforts in The Netherlands, was intended to promote tulips in the United States. Bill Prescott, Sun Valley’s marketing and communications specialist, said set-up took about five hours — and then the tens of thousands of flowers were scooped up by some 5,000 visitors in less than three hours.
“The thing that has stayed with me from the day was just the appreciation and joy in people’s faces,” Prescott said. “People were tearing up, kids were in awe — some of the tulips were taller than they were. So much of our job is about the business side, so it was wonderful for all of us just to see people feeling so much joy around our flowers.”
