The bedroom is the least popular room for displaying indoor plants. While it is generally agreed that all living rooms, kitchens and halls can be improved with living plants, there is a difference of opinion over bedrooms. Some interior designers feel that bedrooms are in use for too short a time during the waking hours to make a house plant display worthwhile.
Having to look after pots and troughs in rooms so far away from the watering can, plant food, pruners etc…kept in the kitchen just prolongs the time spent on housework. The final point made by the anti-school is that there are too few visitors to bedrooms to justify the expenditure on impressive plants.
Fortunately most interior decorators take the opposite view. They know that the bedroom is regarded as a very special room by many people. Despite the limited time spent there and the absence of visitors it is the one area which can truly reflect the design sense of the occupant. You don’t have to worry about the views of the whole family or what friends will think. Here you can create your own arrangement.
The conditions in a centrally-heated bedroom really are too good to waste. It is an excellent spot for plants which hate too much heat in winter and tend to suffer in living rooms which are heated during the day. Examples are Cyclamen, Heliotrope, Beloperone, Hydrangea, Campanula, Buxus, Bougainvillea, Yucca and Abutilon.
Perhaps the best plan is to have one or two really eye-catching specimen plants rather than aiming for the group displays which belong in the living room and the kitchen. A floor-standing architectural plant is the designer’s choice for a large bedroom – in a smaller one you can have a hanging display or else set attractive pot holders on the windowsill or dressing table. An unused fireplace can be masked by a foliage plant display.
Whatever arrangement you choose there is the pleasure of waking to the sight of green foliage and you can go to sleep amid natural fragrance if you choose sweet-smelling types such as Jasmine, Hyacinth and Stephanotis. And forget the old wives’ tale that plants are unhealthy in a bedroom – they are not.
Bedrooms which are heated for all or part of the night in winter make good house plant hospitals. This is a place to overwinter plants which need a rest from high temperatures during the non-flowering season. The bedroom can be a place of relaxation and recuperation for you and the Fuchsias and the Pelargoniums.
