Guest Blogger: How to Choose the Perfect Plant for a Posh Living Environment

Guest Blog #215, Entry #709, October 18, 2011

So, which house plants are best for poshing the living environment? There are many plants to choose from that will make the homeowner feel posh and cause their visitors to stop and take notice. They can be simple and elegant, with a long and proud history of embellishing a home, like palms. They can be wildly colorful and showy like bromeliads. They can even make a visitor believe they’re hard to grow, even though they’re not, like potted citrus trees. Here’s a brief list!

Palms

Nothing beats a potted palm for making a place classy. A surprising number of them make wonderful houseplants.

Fishtail palms, members of the caryota family, grow tall in the wild, but do well indoors. A fishtail palm can tolerate low to medium light but likes bright indirect light and a bit of humidity.

The parlor palm, as its name implies, is ideal for indoors. It lives for a long time in low to medium light and can even stand some cold.

The bamboo palm, with beautiful, dark green leaves, is a robust palm that does well in low light and cool conditions and grows fast.

House Plants

Kalanchoe are beautiful succulents and include air plants, which grow on the trunks of tropical rainforest trees and take nutrients from the air and the rain. Another kalanchoe is the panda plant, with its fat, fuzzy leaves. Kalanchoe need full sunlight but cool temperatures and a sandy soil mix. If the homeowner keeps them in complete darkness between 6:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. beginning in September, theyíll bloom in December.

There are close to 2,000 species of bromeliads, and some of them are also air plants. They donít need much care to thrive indoors, but water has to be kept in the cups formed by the leaves. They should be potted in shallow containers in peat, bark chips, humus, sand or orchid potting mix and the medium should be kept moist. They need to be misted to keep the leaves from getting dusty. Once in a while, the mature plants will put up brilliantly colorful spikes of flowers that last for months.

Caladiums are plants with soft, multicolored leaves and tuberous roots. The leaves can be all kinds of shades of green, cream, pink, red and white and have a soft, crinkly, crepe-like texture. The tubers should be planted in damp peat moss and soil in the late winter. When the shoots begin to appear, the plant should be put in a bright window, watered more frequently and fertilized every month or so. Caladium can live a long time, but the tubers should be rested for about a month by letting the potting mix dry out.

Citrus plants can also be grown in pots indoors. People think theyíre hard to grow, but all they need is a bright, sunny window, average room temperature and cool nights. They need to be misted, pruned once in a while and like to grow in acidic soil. Citrus plants that can grow indoors include Calamondin orange, Ponderosa lemon and Otaheite orange.

Topiary

These are plants that are trained around topiary frames to make living sculptures like spheres, cubes, pyramids or animals. Good plants for topiary are compact plants like yew or privet, or any plant that can tolerate being rather drastically and regularly trimmed. An amount of patience is needed to cultivate a good topiary plant and the homeownerís guests will be impressed at their skill and dedication as they train and trim the plant into the shape they wish.

Ryan Cooper works part-time for a florist loving to surround his family and himself with the beauty of flowers and plants. ‘It is a living proof that people who surround themselves with the beautiful things in life live healthier and for my wife and my child I want to create the most beautiful and healthy environment that is even possible. To me flowers and plants show affection – the show how much someone means to you in a simple understated but yet important kind of way.’

For more green living ideas on Stagetecture, click here.