Healthier Homes with Houseplants
Beautify your home while cleaning the air you and your family breathe.
Once the decorations are packed away, empty spaces open up in the household. Filling those empty spaces in your home with living, breathing houseplants can help keep your family healthy and your home beautiful!
Choose plants to accent rooms:
Complement the features of a room by emphasizing the size, shape and color of plants. Select a specimen-sized Palm for a room with high ceilings or choose a fluffy Fern displayed on a vintage fern stand to fill a sunny corner. Add a splash of color with the blooms of an African Violet or enjoy the vivid coloration found in the foliage of the Dracaena family. Surrounding yourself with plants indoors is sure to put a smile on your face and provide other benefits!
Improving air quality:
It is a proven fact that plants can improve indoor air quality. Researchers for NASA, while developing technology that would allow humans to live in a closed environment on the moon or Mars, discovered that houseplants are the quickest and most effective filters of common, dangerous air pollutants. Plants clean the air by two different methods. They first literally suck the chemicals out of the air. Each plant leaf has thousands of “pores”, also called stomata, which handle most of the filtration process. The second method is through a cleansing process where the toxins are absorbed into the soil and filtered by the root system.
Research has shown that you should have one medium-sized houseplant per 100 square feet of living area. Set up two to three plants per room, based on an average sized room, so there is plenty of space around each one for good air circulation. The more vigorous the plant, the more air it can filter. Keep the leaves clear of dust since most pollutants are absorbed by the leaves.
Several of the “best air cleaning” and easy-to-grow houseplants include:
- Bamboo Palm (Chamaedorea seifrizii): removes benzene, trichloroethylene and formaldehyde
- Boston Fern (Nephrolepis exaltata): eliminates formaldehyde
- Chinese Evergreen (Aglaonema modestum): removes formaldehyde and benzene
- Dracaena’s: removes trichloroethylene, formaldehyde and benzene
- English Ivy (Hedera helix): eliminates formaldehyde and benzene
- Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum): removes acetone, methyl alcohol, ethyl acetate and benzene
- Pothos (Epipremnum aureum): removes formaldehyde
- Rhapis Palm (Rhapis excelsa): disposes of airborne ammonia and formaldehyde
- Rubber Plant (Ficus elastica): cleans up formaldehyde
- Snake Plant (Sansevieria): removes nitrogen-oxide and formaldehyde
Breathe a breath of fresh air into your surroundings while providing a vibrant “green” look!
For more information, Calloway’s and Cornelius Nursery will be hosting a FREE garden clinic on Houseplants Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 10:15 am in all stores.
Determine if your plan needs to be repotted then visit Houston garden center, Cornelius Nursery, or DFW garden center, Calloway's Nursery, for a Repotting Festival. Bring you own plants and containers or buy what you need, use our potting area and free premium soil to create fresh indoor gardens for your home and leave the mess to us.