Plantscaping

What is plantscaping? It is interior design focusing on indoor plants as the featured design elements – interior plant design.

Plantscaping is a way to bring nature inside to create warm and inviting spaces for employees, visitors and even homeowners. With plantscaping, plants are a part of the design, not an afterthought.

We often take the vision of a designer or architect and incorporate living and replica plants into the design. Sometimes the plants become the design, such as with a living wall or a moss wall, or sometimes the plants are featured in decorative pots.

Over the years, we’ve brought plantscaping to many beautiful San Diego commercial buildings, office buildings, hospitals and residences. Our portfolio highlights some of our favorite projects.

Workplace – Commercial Plant Designing

Scientific studies show plants in the workplace produce many productivity and wellness benefits. Plants oxygenate the air and reduce carbon dioxide and environmental toxins. They can help baffle excess noise and reduce visual distractions.

The result: plants can increase employee productivity, reduce stress, cut down on absenteeism and even employee turnover. People report increased creativity and problem-solving in workplaces with plants and other elements of nature.

The result for your business or organization: healthier work and living areas creating improved health and well-being, resulting in more overall satisfaction and happiness in your life. Plantscaping is an investment in your environment, your health and your success!

Misting Indoor Plants: The Whole Truth

  Do you need to mist your indoor plants to keep them healthy? No, you don’t. If I stopped there, this would be the shortest blog post in Good Earth Plant Company history! But I wouldn’t do that to my loyal readers. Let’s discuss misting in a little more detail. We get asked about this frequently, especially during hot summer days. Plants and people like the same indoor  humidity Indoor plants prefer a humidity level between 40 and 60 percent. Most common types of indoor plants are native to parts of the world where there is a lot of rain and humidity.… Read More

Listen Up: Our Latest Blog Is a Podcast about Plants

Jim Mumford recently appeared on the "It's Your Life" radio show - and now you can hear the podcast version on demand. podcast about plants
Time for something a little different on the Good Earth Plant Company blog this week. You can listen instead of read! I recently spent an hour on the “It’s Your Life” radio show in San Diego, which is also a podcast on all platforms. The theme of the show: “Bringing the Living World of Plants Into Our  Everyday Life.” I couldn’t have done better myself! Host Jim Cooley and co-host Michelle Cooley (yes, they’re husband and wife)  put their curiosity and interviewing skills to good use. They both asked all about plants, plantscaping, living walls, moss walls, green roofs, biophilia and biophilic design – and more.… Read More

Things Are Looking Up For Plant Lovers

Our recent "overhead moment" project for Open Air Vintage took advantage of the high ceilings in its warehouse showroom.
Indoor plants are having more than a moment. Good Earth Plant Company loves seeing so many people adding indoor plants to their home and work environments. It might be the one good thing coming from the pandemic. Since 1977, we’ve been big advocates for the power of plants to improve the quality of your surroundings, from cleaning the air to clearing your mind. Plants are a lot like potato chips. You can’t have just one. It’s also true plants thrive when they are grouped together – and they look cool. But there’s only so much surface space to go around. You can add shelf space and place plants on your existing furniture (be careful with the watering), but at some point, you run out.… Read More

Client Happiness and Health Always Wins Big

Good Earth Plant Company got a nice surprise this week: our living wall project at 655 W. Broadway has won a Silver Award in its category in the 2021 Biophilic Design Awards. We love seeing our client projects featured, and we love seeing everyone else’s work. Awards make us feel great, but what’s more important about them is providing an objective measurement of the quality of our projects. Are we doing the best possible work we can for our clients? Where do we rate against our (mostly friendly) competitors? What can we learn from THEIR award-winning projects? This project has a special place in our horticultural hearts.… Read More

Indoor Plant Trends We Love in 2021

It's good to get out, renew our relationships, and learn a few new tricks for our clients! Photo: Jim Mumford Indoor plant trends
While we were fortunate to flourish despite the pandemic at Good Earth Plant Company, it made me more aware of the importance of human socialization. We are pack animals and we do best when we interact, share ideas, and work together. This lesson became even more vivid to me this week when I attended my first workplace greenery and horticulture conference since the shutdown early last year. It’s one of my favorite shows – Cultivate 21 held annually in Columbus, Ohio by American Hort, our national organization supporting and promoting the horticulture industry. Attendance was nearly as strong as 2019! There are more than 650 exhibitors and 10,000 industry professionals like me from 30 different countries taking in the eight-acre trade show, four days of educational opportunities, and talking with my colleagues about the latest trends and solutions for our clients.… Read More

Indoor Plant Container Basics For Everyone

Mixing and matching different plant and containers into a display adds up to an impressive feature in a home or workspace. Photo: Jim Mumford
So much of our inspiration at Good Earth Plant Company comes from the containers our plants live in. Don’t get me wrong. Our mission remains focused on enriching peoples’ lives with plants. But over the years, some of my biggest brainstorms came when I stretched my thinking about containers. When I realized a green roof is just one big container for plants, it started a whole new business. Plants and containers are inseparable partners to us at Good Earth Plant Company. We work with our clients to choose their containers with care – and flair! Along with the indoor plant craze that started during the pandemic, people have been getting creative with containers, too.… Read More

Indoor Plant Index Is Rising Fast

It's not your imagination. Indoor plants are in short supply and they are worth more. Illustration: Mohamed Hassan Indoor Plant Index
Have you noticed how hard it is to find certain products or services lately? It’s not your imagination. Because of the way many of our spending and purchasing habits have changed combined with unusual limitations due to supplies and employment, there’s a lot more demand. At the top of the list, the home improvement industry has gone wild. While we were all stuck at home, we looked around and realized we needed to refresh our surroundings. This means we all called contractors, plumbers, painters, and electricians, and plantscapers. The good ones are busy, so get in line soon. It’s a shock to see the jump in building material prices, especially lumber and plywood.… Read More

Making Magic With Moss Walls

In case you haven’t figured it out, we love plants at Good Earth Plant Company. From our very first days selling “potted” plants and flowers, it’s been our mission to enrich peoples’ lives with plants. Over the years, we’ve gone big with plants in the form of green roofs and living walls. Living walls have been some of our all-time favorite projects. We’ve put them in restaurants, hotels, malls, schools, and quite a few private homes. They challenge us to be creative and customize each project to meet our client’s needs. But living walls need the right conditions, whether indoors or outdoors, to thrive.… Read More

Ten Plant Care Urban Legends You Need to Ignore

We love enriching peoples’ lives with plants at Good Earth Plant Company. We live for it! One of the ways we do this is sharing our tips and dropping some knowledge on you. Over the last year, so many people brought plants into the homes and their lives for the first time during the pandemic. It’s one of the most positive outcomes of a not-so-positive experience. Over many years, we’ve gotten a lot of questions about plant care, and we’ve also gotten some “tips” ourselves. I’m putting “tips” in quotes, because so many of the things we’ve heard need some serious correcting.… Read More

Plants Matter: Our Ten Reasons Why

From avocados to zucchini, plants are the basis for all foods humans consume. Photo: Any Lane/Pexels Plants Matter
Food Are you reading this over a meal or snack? Without plants, forget having anything to eat. Every single one of the calories in proteins, fats, and carbohydrates we consume comes from plants. Yes, this includes meat, because animals we consume as food eat plants. Plants use the energy created from photosynthesis to convert carbon-dioxide to complex molecules animals including people eat for food. It hardly gets more basic than this! But we have nine more reasons to go. Oxygen Hold your breath. You probably can’t do it for more than a few minutes. Life on Earth depends on oxygen, and that oxygen comes mostly from plants, which generate oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis.… Read More