Live planting in a room with no daylight works only while somebody is paid to keep replacing it. There is no natural light, the air conditioning runs dry, the cleaning contract stops short of watering, and nobody has the job of noticing. Interior rooms like that turn up in almost every building.
Floor scale. There is no window in the frame, and the piece does not need one.
Why live bonsai fail in a workplace
Three separate things go wrong and they compound.
Light. No interior corridor gives a bonsai what it needs. The species that tolerate interiors are tropical and want a bright window. Juniper and pine, which is what most people picture when they hear bonsai, are outdoor trees that need a dormant winter.
Office lighting is built around what a person needs to read by. That is a fraction of what a plant lives on, and more lamps do not add up to daylight.
Water. A bonsai pot holds very little soil and dries in hours rather than days. So it wants checking daily in summer, which no facilities contract covers. A tree that misses a long weekend in July can be beyond saving by Tuesday.
Ownership. A plant in reception belongs to everybody, which means it belongs to nobody. A plant on someone’s desk has an owner. The person who used to water the one in reception left in March.
Choose a replacement planting contract only if you want live planting for its own sake. It solves the replacement problem, but you keep paying every month, for ever.
What preserved juniper does instead
It needs no light at all. A preserved piece has stopped photosynthesising, so you can put it in a windowless room as easily as a bright one.
It needs no water, so there is nothing to schedule and nothing to spill on a reception desk. It holds its shape, so it does not outgrow the spot or drop leaves on the carpet.
The juniper pieces last seven years or more, which is long enough to outlast most fit-outs. How preserving works and what the lifespan figures mean is set out in full separately.
The rooms this actually solves
Reception and front desk. The single best case. People stand there and wait with nothing to look at, so it is the one spot that gets close viewing. No window needed, nobody to water it, and the surface is usually deep enough for a sixteen to twenty-two inch piece.
Meeting rooms. Put a desk-scale piece on the credenza in an interior meeting room. These are the most light-starved spaces in most buildings.
Corridors and lift lobbies. The three to four foot pieces work here, on the floor or on a plinth. Check the traffic first: preserved foliage does not take being brushed past all day, so it wants a recess rather than a pinch point.
Hotel landings and guest rooms. Watering is rarely part of a housekeeping round, and a preserved piece survives a room standing empty for weeks.
Treatment rooms, spas, consulting rooms. Check the humidity first. These are quiet rooms where a plant is part of the atmosphere, and humidity is the one thing that rules a preserved piece out.
The two places it still does not work
Direct sun through glass. Sun fades preserved foliage, and the fade is uneven and permanent. So that rules out an atrium, a south or west-facing window wall, and a glass-roofed link between two buildings.
A west-facing lobby in Phoenix or the Inland Empire takes hard afternoon sun through the glass for months at a time, and a piece set in that light will show it inside a year.
Use UV-rated artificial in those positions instead. Read what UV-rated means before specifying, because the term is used loosely.
Real humidity. Glycerin pulls water out of the air, so preserved foliage goes tacky in a genuinely damp room and degrades over time. Pool surrounds, spa wet rooms and lobbies in coastal Florida where the doors stand open in August are all wrong for it.
A conditioned interior at ordinary office humidity is fine, and that covers most of the building.
Sun and damp are the two to design around. Air conditioning, no windows, being moved between floors and a fortnight of nobody in the building do not touch it.
What to specify
For a single desk or credenza, ten to fourteen inches. For a reception counter, sixteen to twenty-two. For a floor position in a corridor or a landing, three to four feet.
The full sizing argument, including the spread measurement that catches people out, is in the sizing guide.
$150. A desk or a credenza in an interior meeting room.
$474. A reception counter, where people stand and wait.
$664. A corridor, a landing, or on a plinth at counter height.
Specify the pot as well as the tree. A black ceramic pot and a carved teak bowl put the same tree in different rooms.
Then check whether the piece needs a plinth. A three-foot bonsai on the floor reads low, and the same piece at counter height reads deliberate.
Pieces at floor scale travel by freight. Your quote includes delivery. How that works.
Ordering several
Most of our commercial work is quoted rather than bought from the cart, and multiples are the usual reason. Tell us the rooms and the surfaces and we will put a set together.
Vary the height and hold the species. That is what makes four pieces read as a collection rather than as a bulk order.
If the job is larger than bonsai, the same logic runs through the hotel and hospitality work and through the commercial sculpture side, where the pieces follow a drawing rather than coming off a shelf.
The range we carry, with prices, is on the bonsai category.
Questions we get asked
Is it fire rated?
No. The preserved pieces do not carry a flame-spread rating, and we will not claim one. If your specification requires a rated interior finish, say so before you order: some artificial materials are supplied with a rating and preserved foliage generally is not, and it is much cheaper to have that conversation first.
Does it need any light at all?
None. It has stopped photosynthesising, so an interior corridor with no window suits it exactly as well as a bright room does.
Who maintains it?
Whoever cleans the room. Dusting is the whole of it, so put it on the cleaning round rather than leaving it to whoever happens to notice. That is why this works in a building where the person nearest the plant changes every six months.
Can you supply several at once?
Yes, and most of our commercial work is quoted that way. Tell us the rooms and the surfaces and we will put a set together and price it in one go.
