Surround Yourself With Green!
The sun is out, there’s a breeze outside, and everything is in bloom, so why on earth would you want to have plants inside when you’ll just be outside? Indoor plants provide many different benefits to you indoors and are something you can enjoy year round, not just in the spring and summer months! With the sun shining outside and longer days, now is a great time to introduce some new plants to your space and really tailor it to a place that will bring you joy when the sun is less abundant and the temperatures go down.
Benefits of Indoor Plants
Indoor plants provide several different benefits to people. Amongst these benefits are reductions in anxiety, stress, and boosts to productivity. In essence, being able to bring the outdoors in even slightly can help with your overall well-being. By taking care of plants, it does much like having a pet does by providing you with a living organism that depends on you for survival. People also find joy in watching the plants as they grow into their pots, grow new leaves, and lose the old ones.
The stress relieving benefits of plants come from their visual appearance and our interactions with them. Studies have shown that simply being in the presence of plants can help reduce stress and invite a sense of calm in part due to their color and textures. Interacting with plants by taking care of them also has the ability to redirect your attention from your current stresses and give you something to focus on other than your stressor.
Space Design
When you are ready to start planning where to put your plants there are several options you can keep in mind! You’ll need to determine where you can comfortably reach the plants to water them, where they won’t be too much in the way, and where they can receive enough sunlight. If you have pets, plant location is extremely important especially when taking your pet’s personality into account. If you have a pet that likes to dig or eat plants, then you will need to ensure the plants are put in places that they cannot reach. At the very least, it is highly recommended to only get pet safe plants just in the event they figure out how to reach them.
When taking that into account, putting plants on walls up and out of the way is often times the best way to add plants to your home. For this, there are specific wall planters that have been made to give you a wall that appears to be entirely made of plants! But, for many houseplant keepers, just a few shelves are more than enough to add in plants to your home. For most indoor plants standard shelf brackets, like our Right Angle, Hook Shelf, and Lip Shelf brackets are more than enough to support them.
Other than putting plants on walls, using surfaces like tables and windowsills are great options. They allow the easiest access to the plants and allow you to sit amongst them in some ways. Simply putting the plants on these surfaces also allows you to move them around more easily. If you are someone who likes to adjust how your space is designed regularly, putting the plants on surfaces is probably the best way to go and will give you the most flexibility in how they are set up.
Plant Styling
When you have decided in general where you want your plants to be, you know the amount of light you can provide, and the number of plants you can comfortably handle you can bring them into your home and get styling! For most rooms or walls, texture is everything. In the world of houseplants there are so many textures to choose from. There are big leafy plants, ones with tight waves, long, thin, the list goes on. When looking at plants that fit your home requirements, take into account what the plants look like and what you would most enjoy seeing everyday.
Plant wall designs can be just a few simple plants on shelves all the way to having the wall fully covered in greenery. If you want to give the appearance of floating plants, you can use a combination of floating brackets and plant foliage, or if the plant has enough greenery, you can get the look with standard brackets with clever placement of the leaves. Another fun take on plant wall design would be to create paths across the wall with the leaves of the plants from shelf to shelf or even with the help of small hooks on the wall to arrange the leaves and stems.
If you’d prefer to not put plants on the wall, putting them on the floor and tables is always a great idea as well. Some prefer to spread their plants throughout the space, without grouping them together. Others prefer to have little “plant islands” throughout their space. These are areas where you can look and see mostly plants, all their different heights, textures, and colors.
Plants are a great addition to most every living space due to their benefits, both mentally and visually. With the many varieties there are plants that can work in most any environment and with most constraints from pet safe, to almost unkillable. With the long days we have now, take the time to branch out into plants and be ready for the shorter days to come!
