Ask yourself several questions before purchase the houseplant to find the houseplant suit you most. Choose the right plant may save your time in taking care of those plants and make your plant grow lively and presentable. Please answer the following questions first before you decide which species of plant you want to purchase.

1. How much of times you may spend in taking care of your plants?

Drought Tolerance Levels

How much of time you may spend on your houseplant have decide the frequency for watering and time you may spend on pruning the houseplant. If you’re a busy person and cannot spare much time in take care your plants then you should choose high drought tolerance and shady tolerance plants. Those plants need watering once to twice a week only and no extra maintenance jobs like bringing the plant to outside for sun exposure. 

Growing Rate of Houseplant

How fast the houseplant grow will decide when you have to prune your houseplants. If you’re a busy person, you should choose slow growing plants. For example, Sansevieria, Zamioculos zamiifolia and Ficus elastic and Ficus lyrata those are high drought tolerance, shade tolerance and slow growing plants. If you’re a busy person, you may choose these kind of low maintenance houseplant as decoration in your house.

2. Where to place the house plant?

Light intensity of the place

Different degree of light intensity suitable to place different types of houseplant. Place the houseplants in suitable growing environment enable the houseplant grow better and less maintenance jobs needed. We don't need to move the houseplant to outside for sun exposure to maintain it’s vigorous. Example of low light intensity plant are Sansevieria, Syngonium, Aglaonema, Anthurium, Spathiphyllum and ZZ plant. In contrary, those plants require higher light intensity are succulent plants like Aloe vera, cactus and Echeveria.

The position and the space available for the houseplants 

If you plan to place your houseplants on the cabinet or on the table, the height of the houseplant should not too high. Besides that, if the space is limited, we should choose the houseplant with less branches or smaller in size and the space will not look crowded. If you want to place smaller size houseplant you may choose Syngonium, Aglaonema or Sansevieria which are grown up to 1 meter only.  And if you intend to place some bigger size house plant, you may choose Ficus elastica or Ficus lyrata which may grown up to 15m high if not pruning it. 

3. What is your purpose for placing the houseplant at home?

Different Function of Houseplant

House plants could acts as natural air purifier, reduce the room temperature, increase the room humidity and provide greenery scene

Some of the houseplants have identified could be purify the volatile organic compound (VOC) like formaldehyde, benzene and trichloroethylene in the air. So the air tight building which could trap the VOC in the building may make use of houseplants to reduce the air pollutants trapped the building. The plants may absorbs the pollutants to the soil and the microorganisms in the roots zone may convert the air pollutants into the foods for plants. As part of the photosynthetic and respiratory processes, plants release moisture vapour to the air also. It may increases the humidity of the air around our living spaces. Besides that, it provide a greenery scene for our eyes to focus after a long hours staring at the electronic devices’ screen. 

Acts as divider for differentiate the space in house or natural screening in your house 

Houseplant could acts as natural divider by placing it around the space you want to differentiate it from the other space. For instance, if you want to make a reading corner, you may place Ficus elastic in a row to acts as screening to reduce the noise and block the view from the other space in the house.

Think clearly the above three questions first before we decide which houseplant we want to purchase to avoid waste of money in keep changing the unsuitable houseplant in the house. Besides that, choose the right houseplant could save our time in maintaining the houseplant in the most presentable look. 

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