Plant care for your office

MotherBotanist is an office plant care service in the San Francisco Bay Area. A MotherBotanist technician visits your office once a week and cares for the plants on site. MotherBotanist is a brand of Ramayrat Ventures, Inc.

Plant care as a service is a subscription for plant maintenance. You pay a monthly fee. A plant care company sends a technician on a fixed schedule to water, clean, trim, and inspect your plants. Your staff does not need to care for the plants.

Plans start at $900 per month. This price includes one on-site visit each week for an office with plants on 1 to 2 floors. Offices with plants on 3 or more floors get a custom quote. Offices that need 2 visits each week also get a custom quote.

Each visit has six steps:

1. The technician checks in with your office contact.
2. The technician inspects each plant for pests, disease, and stress.
3. The technician waters each plant on its own schedule and adds fertilizer during the growing season.
4. The technician removes dust from the leaves and cuts off dead leaves.
5. The technician turns plants so that all sides get light.
6. The technician photographs each plant and records the care in your client portal.

MotherBotanist serves offices in San Francisco, San Mateo, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Santa Clara, and San Jose, California. If your office is in a different Bay Area city, contact us.

Each plant in your office has a QR label. On each visit, the technician scans the label, cares for the plant, takes a photo, and records the care. The photo and the care record go to the plant profile in your client portal.

The client portal works on your phone and on the web. It lists each plant by floor and room. Each plant profile shows the latest photo, the weekly photos, its location, its status, and its care history.

Common office plants include the fiddle leaf fig, monstera, snake plant, peace lily, ginseng ficus, and zebra plant. Each species needs different light and water. Read our plant care guides for the needs of each species.

It depends on the species. For example:

• Monstera: water thoroughly, then let the top quarter to one-third of the soil dry (monstera guide).
• Peace lily: keep the soil evenly moist but not soggy (peace lily guide).
• Snake plant: water sparingly, and only every 1 to 2 months in winter (snake plant guide).
• Zebra plant: let the soil dry out between waterings (zebra plant guide).

Too much water causes root rot in snake plants, ginseng ficus, and zebra plants, according to NC State Extension. On each visit, our technician checks the soil of each plant and waters only the plants that need it.

Of the six common office plants in our guides, only the zebra plant is non-toxic. NC State Extension lists the zebra plant as non-toxic to pets, and the ASPCA lists Haworthia species as non-toxic to cats and dogs.

The ASPCA lists the monstera, the snake plant, and the peace lily as toxic to cats and dogs. It also lists figs (Ficus sp.) as toxic. The fiddle leaf fig and the ginseng ficus are figs. Keep toxic plants where pets cannot reach them. Compare pet safety for each plant.

Not by a measurable amount in a normal office. In 2020, Cummings and Waring reviewed 12 published studies of potted plants and volatile organic compounds (VOCs). These studies tested plants in small, sealed chambers. The review compared plants with normal outdoor air exchange in buildings. To remove VOCs as fast as that air exchange, a building needs 10 to 1,000 plants per square meter of floor space.

The 1989 NASA Clean Air Study also tested plants in sealed chambers, not in real buildings. Do not expect potted plants to replace building ventilation.

Sources: Cummings and Waring, Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology (2020), doi:10.1038/s41370-019-0175-9; Wolverton, Johnson, and Bounds, NASA-TM-101766 (1989).

Select Get a quote at the top of this page. Tell us your office city, the number of floors with plants, and the number of visits that you want each week. We reply by email with a quote.