Decorate With Nature
These simple tricks for choosing and positioning potted plants will bring outdoor beauty into your home.
November/December 2007
By Barbara Pleasant
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Place decorative plants such as this orchid (Cymbidium Magic Mountain 'Valentine') in front of a mirror to enhance their gorgeous blooms.
Rosemary Kautzky
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Well-chosen plants—artfully displayed—enhance your home’s unique look and make it feel healthier and more connected with nature. When selecting indoor plants, plan where you want to display them and what look you hope to achieve.
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To get started, explore your home for special niches where plants can serve more than one purpose. Like furniture and other fixtures, every plant in your home should have a job it does well. Indoor plants can define spaces, soften the lines of angular furniture and bridge the transition between the indoor and outdoor worlds.
Energized entryways
Feng shui practitioners often suggest placing a plant in your home’s main entryway to help pull in natural energy, but you don’t want it to add clutter. Upright plants that don’t mind cold drafts are ideal; snakeplant (Sansevieria trifasciata) and cast-iron plant (Aspidistra elatior) top the list of easy entryway plants. (See “20 Indoor Plants Even You Can’t Kill” on page 58.)
To keep the plants beautiful and healthy, trim blemished leaves with pruning shears, wipe leaves clean with a damp cloth and slip the plant into a décor-friendly container. If you and the plant are happy after a month (the time it takes for a plant to adjust to a new site), repot it into a slightly larger container where it can stay at least two years.
Many entryways include a mirror—an instant way to double a plant’s presence while adding light to the scene. Beautiful bloomers such as orchids (Orchidaceae spp.) and cyclamens (Cyclamen spp.) make wonderful looking-glass plants, or you can opt for dependable, easy-to-please foliage such as Chinese evergreen (Aglaonema modestum). The mirror trick works well in any room. In a small bathroom, mirrors can make one small rabbit’s-foot fern (Phlebodium aureum) look like three.
Softening hard lines
In living and dining rooms, high shelves or tall pieces of furniture will appear less blocky and imposing if you soften upper corners with cascading plants. Heart-leaf philodendron (Philodendron cordatum) is ideal for spots with limited light, pothos (Epipremnum spp.) works well in brighter spots, or you can try rattail cactus (Aperocactus flagelliformis) where sunlight rules. Cacti are hands-off plants, but rambling vines need trimming back once or twice a year.
Choose low, wide containers that won’t raise the already high vertical profile. This is one place where the pot should play a quiet supporting role. If the container matches the wall color, for example, it’s easier to achieve a feeling of unity between the furniture and the plant.