Home&Garden San Francisco Chronicle and SFGate.com | Wednesday, November 4, 2009 | Section L
FALL DECOR: GREENING THE HOUSE THE DIRT
By Joe Eaton and Ron Sullivan
It’s a plant — and an air filter
Russell Yip / The Chronicle
Durable and decorative as they are, spider plants tend to be taken for granted. According to a team of Penn State scientists, though, the plants may be performing a vital service: removing ozone from indoor air. That may also be true of snake plants and golden pothos. Ozone is a paradoxical gas. In the upper atmosphere, it helps shield the planet from harmful ultraviolet radiation; thinning ozone layers over the poles have been a major environmental concern. At ground level, ozone is a bad actor, a major component of smog. It’s also a worrisome indoor pollutant in offices and homes, with copy machines, laser printers, ultraviolet lighting and some electrostatic air purification systems as known or suspected sources. Human health consequences include pulmoInside: Nearly nary edema, indestructilesions on lung ble housetissue and other plants. L2 respiratory disorders. The Penn State group, headed by Heather L. Papinchak and E. Jay Holcomb, published their findings in a recent issue of the journal HortTechnology. They chose spider plant, snake plant and golden pothos as test subjects because they were cheap and readily available. The experimental plants were grown in a greenhouse with a charcoal-filtered air supply system that kept ozone levels at 5 parts per billion — comparable to the average ozone emissions from a photocopier. Placing the plants in sealed chambers, the scientists pumped in ozone until a concentration of 500 ppb was reached, then measured how long it took for ozone levels to return to baseline. For all three houseplant species, the ozone concentration fell faster than in plantless control chambers. There was no
Sullivan continues on L2
Baylor Chapman, owner and floral designer of Lilia B. Design in the Mission District, is known for sustainable gardens.
DESIGN
Art from nature’s oddities Mark Costantini / The Chronicle 2006
In a follow-up to a 1980s NASA study, Penn State scientists found spider plants remove bad ozone from indoor air.
Unexpected displays bring rooms to life
By Chantal Lamers SPECIAL TO THE CHRONICLE
Baylor Chapman’s San Francisco home isn’t about formal floral centerpieces or huge houseplants. For the sought-after designer, known for sustainable gardens and floral arrangements, home is about personal touches, repurposing materials and using nature’s knickknacks to their utmost potential. In many ways, the choices that Chapman makes with foliage are second nature. It’s not simply because as the owner of Lila B. Design (named for her grandmother and great-grandmother), she isn’t limited to premixed supermarket bouquets and hardware store houseplants. It’s Chapman’s knack for knowing how some of
the most unobvious of nature’s greens can be integrated as decorative objects throughout her airy Mission District studio. “I try to connect food with flowers,” says Chapman. “Something that will come in useful later.” No matter the level of whimsy, she manages to give her peculiar-meets-practical
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FLOORING
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