Plants for Your Bedroom

Your bedroom is a place meant for you to unwind and relax at the end of each day. Creating an oasis of tranquility in this space helps you recharge for a good start to a new day. The best way to do this is by using plants for your bedroom to improve air and sleep quality.

If you’re having problems sleeping at night even after trying meditation and other relaxation techniques, it is possible you are overlooking a significant factor, the room itself. A bedroom that isn’t conducive for sleep causes bouts of tossing and turning.

While the main factor for placing plants in your home is to enhance its appearance, it’s not the only reason. Indoor plants create an environment that is peaceful and relaxing while improving air quality. This combination lowers stress levels, blood pressure, and heart rate to calm the mind and body for good night’s sleep.

Houseplants for Better Sleep

There are a few things to think about when choosing plants for your bedroom. All plants have air-purification properties, and some have relaxing scents that help lull you to sleep. Even the foliage color and growing tendencies of the plant have a calming effect.

Why Should I Have Houseplants in My Bedroom?

You sleep in this room for approximately eight hours a day, and often the door and windows are shut. Without fresh air circulating through the room, you are breathing stale and stagnant air during your sleeping hours. Plants are beneficial to the room because they improve air quality, helping you sleep better.

Not only that, but houseplants reduce stress and increase positive energy. Specific herbal plants such as lavender, chamomile, valerian, and jasmine are known for their calming abilities. Other plants, such as aloe vera, remove harmful chemicals from the air.

How Do Houseplants Affect Indoor Air?

While you sleep, you breathe out carbon dioxide. Plants absorb this carbon dioxide and release oxygen. They also increase humidity, which is a great benefit during dry, winter months.

Studies performed at NASA and other respected institutions show that not only do plants release oxygen, but they clean the air as well by passively absorbing air pollutants. They absorb gases and volatile organic compounds such as xylene, toluene, and trichloroethylene through pores on their leaves and roots.

Which Types of Houseplants are Good for Sleep?

The best houseplants for your home are air-purifying plants that require medium to low light. Choose plants that are low maintenance since bedroom plants tend to get slightly less care than other plants throughout your home.

Some of the best plants for the home are ones that have a graceful appearance. These plants inspire a sense of relaxation. Choose plants with variegated leaves to add calming color to the room. Consider getting plants that bloom with fragrant scents to help lull you to sleep.

How Can I Grow Plants in without Much Light?

Different plants require different types of lighting to thrive. These include direct, indirect, medium, and low. Direct sun plants enjoy resting in front of south-facing windows while medium light plants grow better in front of the west or east-facing windows.

If your room doesn’t get much light or your window faces north, consider placing an indoor light source near your plants. Medium to low light plants grow well with artificial lighting from fluorescent bulbs.

Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum)

This classic houseplant is one of the easiest to grow with its bright green leaves and tropical looking white flowers. Peace lily blooms year-round, and it makes an excellent air purifier for the home.

The standard peace lily grows 1 to 3 feet in height, but a deluxe plant reaches a height of up to 5 feet or more. The flowers of this plant start green and gradually whiten for a spectacular display. Peace Lily thrives in light partial shade, and it requires water when the leaves droop slightly.

Spider Plant (Chlorophytum comosum) – The ‘Impossible to Kill’ Plants for Your Bedroom

This vintage favorite has a long history of being the houseplant that virtually anyone can grow. It is considered by many to be the best plant to have in your bedroom. This highly adaptable houseplant has green and variegated leaves and sprouts small, white flowers that turn into plantlets.

Spider plants require very little care and thrive in all levels of sunlight but prefer indirect light. They even don’t mind if you forget to water them occasionally. Divide this plant easily by removing the plantlets and placing them in moist soil.

Parlor Palm (Chamaedorea Elegans)

This plant adds color and texture to the room with its graceful palm leaves and height. Unlike the areca palm, the parlor palm only needs low light, which makes an excellent houseplant for the home. Too much light burns the leaves, so it grows best in a softly lit corner of the room.

Small varieties of this palm grow to a height of 1 foot while larger types grow anywhere from 4 to 8 feet tall. The parlor palm prefers temperatures between 65 and 80°F and evenly moist soil.

Gardenia (Gardenia jasminoides) – Flowering Plant with Sweet Fragrance

Gardenias have waxy, white flowers with an intoxicating and sweet fragrance that permeates a room. This evergreen plant has shiny leaves that provide a striking contrast to its blossoms. Both relaxing in appearance and aroma, this plant is ideal for a peaceful atmosphere.

This houseplant requires a bit more work than others and prefers high humidity. As fragrant indoor plants for low light conditions, gardenias enjoy part shade and evenly moist soil. Temperatures above 60°F are needed, but that shouldn’t be a problem in the home.

Corn Plant (dracaena fragrant)

If you enjoy the idea of having the appearance of a small tree in your home for a calming effect without an unmanageable height issue, then the corn plant is ideal for you. It has stout trunks with variegated, glossy leaves that provide an attractive anchor in any room.

The corn plant requires filtered sunlight with evenly moist soil. It’s happiest with temperatures in the mid-70’s with occasional light misting. This plant continues to grow in height if you re-pot it in larger containers.

Also as one of the best indoor office plants, the corn plant is easy to care for in a business setting and it looks attractive when set in a corner.

Snake Plant (Dracaena trifasciata) – Houseplant with Sculptural Appeal

Also known as mother-in-law’s tongue, the snake plant adds height, color, and architectural appeal to the room that is both calming and air-freshening. This tough houseplant has tall, leathery leaves in shades of yellow and green.

This slow grower only needs water once every couple of weeks and doesn’t drop leaves like many other houseplants. It is low maintenance, grows to a height of 3 to 8 feet, and requires indirect sunlight.

English Ivy (Hedera helix)

This old-school houseplant has easy to care nature that makes it appealing for the home. It has elegant looking versatile stems with varying shades of foliage from bright green to variegated white and chartreuse. The leaves also come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

While this plant is well known for purifying the air, it does have toxic leaves and needs special attention if you have pets and children. English ivy enjoys partial sun and grows to a length of 3 feet or more.

Golden Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) – Best Air-Filtration Houseplant

Golden pothos is one of the easier plants to grow in the house, and it provides any room with green and chartreuse colored foliage. This vining plant is rated as one of the top plants for filtering toxins in the home.

This low maintenance plant thrives in shade to part sun and is easily grown from stem cuttings. These bedroom plants that clean the air have a width of 3 to 6 feet with vines that get as long as 20 feet without pruning.

Fiddle Leaf Fig (Ficus lyrata)

This trendy houseplant is the focal point of the room with its large leaves and elegant appearance. Situated in the corner of the room, this plant provides a feeling of relaxing in the tropics.

These plants typically thrive in its natural state beneath a canopy of the shady jungle, so it adapts easily to indirect light. When it comes to taking care of the fiddle leaf fig, it thrives on moderation, including water, temperature, and lighting.

For plants to grow in low light in the bedroom or elsewhere in the house, or even in an office setting, you can’t go wrong with the fiddle leaf fig.

Aloe Vera (Aloe vera) – Eye-Catching Plant with Healing Properties

This eye-catching houseplant has lance-shaped succulent leaves speckled with white spots. It is commonly known for the healing properties of its gel-like sap, which aids in moisturizing and healing skin.

Initially grown in dry regions of Africa, growing aloe vera is easy if it has well-drained soil and temperatures above 50°F. Fortunately, as a houseplant, aloe vera doesn’t have to worry about cold temps. It prefers a sunny window and grows to a height of 1 to 3 feet.

Peperomia (Peperomia obtusifolia)

Otherwise referred to as the baby rubber plant, the peperomia is a low maintenance houseplant. Generally found in the rain forests and cloud forests, it is commonly used in the home to provide a calming effect.

This tropical plant enjoys bright, indirect sunlight and is easy to maintain. It has blue/green ornamental foliage and thrives in temperatures between 65 and 80°F. Water this plant infrequently, only when the top inch of the soil is dry.

Philodendron (Philodendron bipinnatifidum) – Toughest Houseplant for Your Home

These plants have been around for years, especially as a bedroom plant. There are two varieties, the upright and the trailing version. The philodendron is such a robust plant that even those with a brown thumb grow it with ease. These no-fuss plants happily trail from hanging baskets without a care in the world.

These plants come in a variety of shades from blue/green to gray/silver and grow to an average length of 5 feet. They enjoy partial sunlight and moderate watering. Propagating philodendron is easy by placing cuttings in a vase of water.

Dracaena (Dracaena fragrant)

These popular houseplants are incredibly tolerant and grow well in the home. Dracaena has upright foliage that is either variegated or green in color. While the small form of this plant is suitable for a tabletop or dresser, the larger variety makes a great house tree for the corner of the room.

This low maintenance plant requires partial to full sun. Occasionally, it produces small white flowers, but generally not inside the house. It grows to an average height of 8 feet when transplanted to larger pots.

Gerbera Daisy (Gerbera jamesonii) – Cheerful and Colorful Flowering Plant

While not always thought of as a houseplant, Gerbera daisies are a good candidate for the home. They have bright, cheerful blooms that bid you good-night and greet you in the morning. What could be better than that?

The Gerbera daisy requires bright light, but it’s well worth it. While this plant is more temporary than a standard houseplant, it makes an excellent long-lasting flower arrangement with colors of red, orange, purple, pink, white, and yellow.

We often overlook the bedroom when freshening up the home with houseplants. It’s easy to forget this room since you spend most of your waking hours in all other areas of your house.

This room is probably one of the most essential rooms in your house to place plants, however. They calm you after a long, hard day and keep the air fresh while you sleep, which results in a healthier state of mind and body.

Using plants for your bedroom to get a better night’s sleep while purifying the air is a great way to maintain health, so why not share our bedroom plant list with your family and friends on Facebook and Pinterest?