Artificial & Preserved Planting

For those that cannot accommodate living plants and trees but would like to add the look and feel of greenery in your building you should consider either artificial or preserved. They are a cost effective alternative to live planting, when issues such as very low light levels, insufficient access, weight restrictions or simply ongoing cost implications become prevalent.

Over the years the quality, performance and variety of Preserved and artificial has improved considerably and at times distinguishing between live and artificial can be impossible.

Artificial plants come in a range of materials for both internal and external use. Typically, for interior use, natural tree trunks with wire and resin stems complete with botanically correct foliage are used to give realistic looking indoor trees and shrubs. Plants used for under-planting come without the natural trunks and are constructed to give life-like shaped plants using wire and resin stems with artificial foliage.

With regards artificial planting, the product can be either sprayed with a fire-retardant solution after manufacturing, which has a very short term quality issue. Alternatively, product can be purchased, which is inherently flame retardant.  The flame retardant is added at the manufacturing stage, so the product remains protected for the plant’s entire life, no re-spraying is required and cleaning of the product is less difficult.

With the changes in climate conditions around the world a unique product for external use has been developed which uses a polymer material with a UV inhibitor to prevent the product from fading or changing colour over a period of time. In the very near future a UV, inherently flame retardant foliage will be available, for those highly populated public areas.

For the next best thing to live plants, you should consider using preserved. It is only available in a few lines, but provides a truly realistic, flexible, unique and practical solution to live planting. Preserved foliage is harvested from sustainably grown plants before going through a systemic process, where the natural fluids of the leaf drain and it absorbs the proprietary non toxic, fire retardant chemical to preserve the leaf. From the early years of Glycerine based solution, preserved is now far different in performance and is now humidity tolerant and fade resistant.