When should you pass a complaining customer on to your supervisor? Only on those rare occasions that you can't deal with it yourself. Since customer service people, such as ourselves, are the first line of defence, we should handle as many of the everyday concerns as we can. We are the ones with the constant weekly [...]
No wonder we all use the common name of croton! Hard to get your tongue wrapped around all those vowels. Yet even if it's hard to say we love to use Codiaeums in all their many varieties. Crotons can be used in so many ways and so many locations that they are one of the staples [...]
When the seasons change it time to be on the lookout for surprise pest attacks. This can especially happen on plants you have come to know well and trust to be pest-free. They can sneak up on us at any time and give us a surprise attack. It's just a pest-filled world, and we have to [...]
About palms in general Rhapis To help you share my passion for Rhapis, also known as the lady palm, a bit of knowledge about its family relations is important. It is a member of the Palmae family. This ancient family is made up of a large group of evergreen monocotyledons. Palms were first defined [...]
How do I prune a Ficus? Where should I start to prune? How can I cut it without asking permission? Is someone watching me? What if I make a mistake? We get personal satisfaction from pruning by improving the appearance and making great-looking trees. Over the years we have developed the "courage to cut". We are [...]
After a day when everything seems to be going wrong, you may find it difficult to believe, but most customer complaints can be resolved. If you're going through a phase in which you can't seem to handle complaints in a satisfactory way, you may be skipping one or two fundamental steps in the problem-solving process. Take [...]
Working in horticulture is hard on our hands. Thorns, sticky plant residue and coarse soils are just some of the conditions that can lead to dry, scarred hands, ragged nails and even skin irritation. Protect your hands with a wide variety of garden gloves made from durable materials including nylon, lycra spandex, polypropylene and other fabrics [...]
It's so upsetting to walk up to a plant that you haven't seen for a week and see a broken, dangling branch, or a smashed in area of a plant. Ohhh, the poor thing! It's gotta hurt! This type of damage ruins the looks of the entire planter and may even endanger the plant's life. How's it [...]
The word Ficus is Latin for "fig", which is appropriate for these fig bearing fruit trees. There are over 900 species of Ficus (in the form of trees, shrubs, and vines) but the most common to the interiorscpaing world are F. lyrata (fiddle-leaf), F. benjamina, and F. amstel. Light These trees prefer medium to bright light [...]
Belonging to the Gesneriaceae family, Aeschynanthus (also called the Lipstick plant) have brightly colored flowers, which differ from most other flowers in that the petals are joined at their base to form a tubular corolla. So many to enjoy There are more than 100 species of the genus Aeschynanthus and they are all long-stemmed trailers with [...]
