The Daily Nsews, May 24, 2001 Carefully chosen plants can improve office life Recently. I took a group of siu- dents from the St. Croix Education- al Complex on hike to a dry forest ecosystem at Jack's and Isaac's bays. Even though this dry wilder- ness area usually looks like the great Arizona and New Mexico desert, during spring, the area is filled with flower blossoms from trees. shrubs, and vine plants. I was so excited about the plants blossoming on the east end of St. Croix. I told Myrtle Pemberton. my co-worker, she had missed out on an adventure watching wild flowers blossoming across this desert land. Pemberton, who works In the business office on the St. Croix campus of UVI. wishes sometimes that she were outside hiking, pick- ing wild flowers. Of course, there ar days at the office when some of us wish we PLANTS c~OnammUrnOM Olasee Davis Our entokenment had never gotten out of bed. But you know. live plants can case your frustration in the office. There is something about green- cry that calms the nerves. Ask Myr. tie Pemberton. who is also known as "Plant Woman." An office with- out the greenness of fresh plants can be a pretty depressing place to walk into first thing in the morning. An office's sweeping flat sur- face offers the perfect backdrop for v See PLANTS, acing page plants. while they. mtum. help to relieve the blankness of long walls. corridors and partitions. plants can give a warm and inviting look that you don't get with furniture alone Studies show that plants increase productivity as well. Yet are is the office whose space Is not at a pre- mium. Furniure tops are needed for workday paraphernalia while walk- ways must be kept clear for safe passage Too much of a good thing can also be harmful. When plants are too numerous and varied, they become a distraction and perfor- mance suffers. So if you haven't much lime to tend to plants. it is better to have one you can keep looking nice than a number of plants struggling to survive. Just as an office is designed to help t unm smoothly, so too should the pla-scaping aim for the practical. Choosing greenery for an office takes knowing how much light each plant needs. On the average, a brightly lt office has between 50 to 100 foot candles of light. This amount is adequate light for almost all indoor plants. You see, whatever light indoor plants require in their unaal outdoor environment, that is the amount required indoors. Light enables a plant to manu- facture food in the leaves. There- fore, higher light means more food production, resulting in faster growth. An indoor plant cannot get too much light. Sometimes a plant next to a sunny window scorches, but this is only because it is underwa- tered. Indoor plants like trees and fens generally need the highest light. while most palms and cane plants tolerate least. An office plant is considered happy when it grows new leaves a least as fast as it sheds its oldest leaves. If a plant loses it leaves faster than it grows new ones. t is dying. Some plants can grow with low light better than others and still sufferno less in decorative quality. One such example, which works particularly well for dressing up the tops of filing cabinets, is Scindap- sus aureus, a new variety of the ied and true trailing pothos, with the added attraction of gold-varie- ed leaves. Where there is room for only a few plants, sticking to a single vari- ety and massing them together re- aes the impression you have more than is actually the case. Plants on top of the filing cabinets, lined up in a row and standing out in the open can act as a divider. A certain amount of consistency and uniformity in plants imbues an office with a sense of order and conveys the impression that things are under control. In looking down a sea of desks in large open room, for example I like to see each one holding a single plan. all of which are identical in type and placed in the same comer on each desk. Plants can visually shorten the space in a long hall; a single hand- some specimen can even stand in for sculpture. You should choose plants that have neat growth habits or that can be kept under control by pruning. Plants left to grow out of control will not make an office feel more like the outdoors. So Mytle. ll the decoration you make in your office with plants can- not come close to Jack and Isaac Bays wild flowers. After all, that's why wild flowers are called just that- wild. Olase Davis. who holds a mas ter of science degree in range man- aement and forestry ecology, is a St. Croix ecologist. activist and writer.