KEY POINTS:
Their father started his now-thriving business with a few handfuls of clay he dug up from the banks of the Matakana River, so it's not surprising that his sons have come up with something equally ingenious. And equally ceramic.
Scions of the iconic Morris & James pottery firm,
Jake and Patrick Morris, are the fellows behind the novel and exceedingly cunning Antipodes planter.
Why exceedingly cunning? Because it allows plants to grow upside down, it saves space and water and it looks bloody marvellous - in fact, downright trendy - doing it.
Patrick, who worked as an investment banker in London before returning to his true calling with clay - doing a design course at St Martin's College of Art from which he graduated with first class honours in 2006 - designed the planter as his final project.
It went on to win the New Designer's Ceramic Design Award in Britain shortly after Patrick's graduation. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown presented Patrick with the prize - "he had clammy hands," Patrick laughs - and now Morris Design's unique planter has worldwide distribution, being sold alongside brands like Philippe Starck, with potential (although as yet unconfirmed) outlets including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Saks and the Conran Shop.
So how did you come up with this crazy idea of growing plants upside down in the first place?
As part of my final year's project I was thinking about the emotional relationships you have with plants, even though I am not a gardener naturally. And I was sitting in a little cafe in Bloomsbury on the way to college when I saw this beautiful office in the building opposite. It was full of plants and I thought that was so lovely. But on looking more closely I could see they had a plant on the photocopier - which seemed impractical as far as working in there went. So I thought, how can you turn that on its head? Literally! And that's where it all started.
How does it actually work though?
Well, that was the hard part, working out how to do it. So what you do is plant the plant normally. Then there's a locking disc - it's a bit like a flat doughnut - that goes on top, with a hole for the plant's stem. You lock that disc in and twist it, it's a bit like a teapot lid. Then you flip the whole thing over.
It sounds like it could get messy?
A little soil comes out of the hole straight away but that's it. And the way it's watered is using a sort of reservoir at the top. This works with a three-step osmotic process, where the roots draw the moisture down. So you can never overwater the plants. And with large plants you can just water them once a month.
It also conserves water. Because if you think about it, with a plant that's the normal way up, you usually flood them and then water comes out of the bottom of the planter, then evaporates. With this method, you're using almost 100 per cent of the water. There's no waste.
Sounds like this invention could help all the plant killers out there?
There are no guarantees. But I can tell you that a friend of mine bought two beautiful palms. We put one into the Antipodes planter and left the other one. That was four months ago. We've just been away overseas but when we got back the one in the upside down planter was healthier.
Can you do this with any sort of plant? I'd say there would be trial and error involved. Because different plants behave differently when they're upside down. Anything you usually have to stake up - like tomatoes or orchids - acts differently when gravity isn't a problem anymore. Palms float downwards really nicely and tomatoes and herbs love it. Orchids are great although you have to use crushed bark rather than bark chips.
Someone also told us bromeliads might not like it as much because they collect a lot of moisture on their leaves.
It seems so simple. How come no one ever thought of doing this before?
When I was looking into patenting the planter, I discovered there was something called the Topsy Turvy planter - but it's a lot more complicated and uses discs of foam and plastic tubing (it's also not half as good-looking as Morris' invention). So I think it's a combination of context. I mean, you just need to look at cities like Tokyo - this is a time when apartments are getting smaller and space for living is at a premium. So this kind of thing has just become more relevant.
What sort of potential uses do you see for your planters?
There's a lot of potential of what you might call 3D gardening. You might have heard of the Frenchman Patrick Blanc? He patented vertical gardening [Blanc grows specialised plants, that require more moisture than soil, up walls, transforming "architecture into garden"] and we heard he was going to try and start gardening on the ceiling too. But the Kiwis have beaten him to it. Because I do think there's a little bit of Kiwi ingenuity to this - we're always challenging convention, refusing to tow the line.
Today when you get a bird's eye view of a big apartment block, it looks like a concrete jungle. But wouldn't it be incredible if every ceiling in that block was covered in greenery and that went 50 storeys high? That could mean more foliage than a small rainforest.
So finally, what's happening with you guys in the near future?
We're setting up the Morris Design Office in Ponsonby and we're hoping it will be an ideas factory with worldwide distribution for whatever comes out of here. We'll be working in that space but also selling products and hopefully it will become a nice little retail environment. At the moment I'm working on designing a hat stand or coat rack. You'll be able to hang the planters on it. Or just use it as a hat stand.
The Antipodes planter is $380 and the smaller Boske herb planter versions are $60-$100. They're available at the Morris Design Office at 181 Ponsonby Rd (next to Agnes Curran cafe). See www.morrisdesignoffice.com.
