Indoor plants can be a great addition to your indoor spaces, but they can also sometimes be expensive and hard to take care of if you are not always at home. More importantly, are they worth getting for the average home, and how much of a difference do they make?
Style
The most obvious reason that people include plants in their homes is the way that they look. There are thousands upon thousands of houseplants to choose from, and each one can fit in with a certain style: you might like cacti in a kitchen window but a fern in a home office, for example. Everybody has their own preferences, but it is easy to find something that fits into the average room, so you can generally buy indoor plants for even the most personal or professional settings.
Keep in mind that most “indoor plants” are specifically named such because they can survive well indoor. As long as you take care of them, it is possible to keep plants in a room that is right in the middle of an office building or an apartment, with some types of plants being much less limited in where they can properly survive.
Air Quality
One of the biggest draws of any plant is the fact that they produce fresh air. It might not feel like much, especially if you only have a small desk plant or two, but it can help purify the room and put you in a slightly better mood. The more plants you have, the stronger the effect becomes, so some people put multiple large plants in an office to help them concentrate.
Sometimes, plants can be a natural way to reduce sickness and stress, too. This varies from person to person, but pure air and a healthier overall room can make a big difference when it comes to overall health. If you spend a lot of time in a room (especially if it is a room that has two functions, like a bedroom with an office desk), plants can improve your health and happiness over time.
Watering and Feeding
Whether you are looking for something simple or the hardiest indoor plants Australia can offer, you will need to care for them. However, most “indoor plants” are types that can survive really well in a nearly sealed room, meaning that they don’t often need much actual food or nutrition. Simpler plants, such as cacti, can live for years with nothing but regular watering and direct sunlight every day. A lot of indoor plants don’t even need to be watered every day and can be topped up once a week while remaining healthy and happy.
While they can’t benefit from rainwater and natural nutrition in the same way that an outdoor plant can, this still means that it doesn’t take long to actually care for them. In a home office, it might only take one or two minutes to fill up a container of water and pour a small amount into each plant. If you have to do that once every three days, it is almost no time out of your schedule at all. While watering your plants is essential if your home office has a high humidity level, it is recommended to find the best plant humidifier.
Scents
Of course, nice smells and fragrances are other benefits that many people overlook at first. Just like outdoor plants, you can get indoor ones that provide a great smell and improve the atmosphere of a room over time. Some of these plants will even be directly edible, such as mint, which allows them to be used in cooking if you are not just keeping them for the smells. Others are purely decorative, but these smells can still be a great way to mask bad odors and make a space feel fresh if you haven’t been there in a while.
Different smells can also be useful in other ways, such as making each room ‘feel’ a certain way. You could buy indoor plants for a bathroom that provide a calmer atmosphere than the plants in your living room or have a distinct scent in each room of the house so that you are not constantly smelling the same plants.
Should I Buy Indoor Plants?
While “indoor plants” can cover plenty of individual plant types, they are a great idea as a whole! Not only do they provide calming smells and a nice improvement to air quality, but they can bring some life into a room that would otherwise be quite empty and bland, and don’t take much effort to look after.