Indoor plants for every room, and which ones are easy

If you have killed a few houseplants and decided you are no good at them, the odds are you just had the wrong plant in the wrong room. Every room in a house has its own light and its own humidity, and picking a plant that already wants those conditions does more for your success rate than any amount of careful watering does.

Living room

Living rooms usually have the best light in the house, which opens up the big statement plants. A monstera with its split leaves fills a corner and keeps going for years. A fiddle leaf fig looks superb and is fussier about a steady position, so it suits you if you are not going to move it about.

The easier picks in here are a rubber plant, which has big glossy leaves and asks for very little, a peace lily, which droops when it is thirsty and stands back up within hours of a drink, and a parlour palm for a softer look.

Bedroom

Bedrooms tend to be dimmer and cooler, so the low light plants earn their place. A snake plant will sit in a bedroom corner for years and barely register that you exist. A calathea has the best patterned foliage of any of them and wants steady moisture and no direct sun, so it suits a bedside table well away from the window.

Kitchen

A kitchen windowsill is the one spot in most houses with good light and a bit of extra warmth, which makes it the obvious place for herbs. Parsley, basil and mint all do well in a pot, and being able to reach over and pick some while you are cooking is most of the appeal.

For foliage, pothos trails happily off the top of a cupboard and forgives a missed watering, an aloe likes the sunny end of the bench, and a spider plant is as tough as they come and throws off babies you can pot up for nothing.

Bathroom

A bathroom with a window is the closest thing to a rainforest most houses have got, and the humidity that fogs your mirror is exactly what the thin leaved plants want. A Boston fern will look better in there than anywhere else in the house. A ZZ plant handles a dim bathroom without complaining. An orchid on a windowsill likes the damp air and the indirect light, and it will flower for weeks at a time.

If the bathroom has no window at all, rotate a plant in and out of a bright room every couple of weeks rather than expecting one to live in there permanently.

Home office

Desk space is tight, so small and slow is what you want. A cactus, a small succulent or a nerve plant all sit in a 100mm pot and stay that way for a long time. Keep the cactus and the succulent nearest the window, because they are the two that genuinely need bright light and they will stretch and go pale without it.

The bits that apply everywhere

  • Drainage holes, always. Put the plant in a plastic pot with holes and drop that inside the decorative one.
  • Check the soil with a finger before watering. Dry, water. Damp, wait. That is the whole method.
  • Match the mix to the plant. A general premium mix for the leafy ones, a cactus and succulent mix for anything that hates wet feet, and an orchid mix for orchids, which want bark and air rather than soil.
  • Feed lightly through the warmer months and lay off through the cold ones, when almost nothing indoors is actively growing.

Shop related products

Did you know we also stock the pots in the shop, including terracotta pots and saucers, hanging pots for the trailing ones, plastic saucers up to 500mm and 200mm planters for a windowsill. They are not on the website, so give us a ring on (08) 8536 4333 to check what is on the shelf.

The mixes, the pots and the herb seed are in the garden centre, and if you tell us which room and which way the window faces we will point you at something that will cope.

More from the garden

Nobody is born with a green thumb, they just stop buying plants that were never going to like their house. Ask me in the shop, I am usually there.

Cheers,
Candeece

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