The Complete Handbook of Plant Stands

Chapter 1: Understanding Plant Stands

A plant stand is load-bearing equipment, not décor. Whether it holds a single prized orchid on a living room sideboard or a hundred square feet of potted nursery stock under shade cloth, a plant stand's single non-negotiable job is to hold its contents aloft, safely, for years, without damaging either the plant or the surface beneath it. Every other attribute of a stand—its style, its finish, its color—exists beneath that functional requirement. This book begins by establishing the practical, physical reality of what a plant stand is and the forces it must withstand, because nearly every failure we will address in later chapters—collapsed legs, rusted joints, stained carpets, toppled specimen plants—can be traced back to someone selecting a stand as if it were a piece of furniture rather than a piece of equipment.

Consider the basic physical problem. A 14-inch plastic nursery pot filled with a standard, well-watered potting mix contains not just the plant, but a surprising amount of mass. The wet soil in such a pot weighs roughly 4 to 6 pounds per gallon. At 3 gallons of mix, that pot holds 12 to 18 pounds of soil alone. Add a well-grown houseplant, a couple pounds of water in the foliage, and the pot itself—you are asking the stand to support anywhere from 15 to 25 pounds on a footprint no larger than the pot's 6-inch base. Now scale upward. A standard 17-inch terra-cotta urn, a common choice for entryway plantings, holds 10