There are low maintenance plants and there are high maintenance indoor plants. Some tropical indoor plants fall under the high maintenance category in plant care if your home has low humidity and these plants require high humidity.
Of course, these high humidity plants tend to be the most popular and most beautiful and we love them because they have low light requirements. They may be easy to care for with the low light requirement, but how do you satisfy their high humidity requirement?
Group them with other indoor plants that DO increase humidity
YES! There are plants that CAN increase humidity in a room. How do they do this? Through transpiration. What happens is these types of plants are your heavier drinkers. They soak up more water from the roots and the water travels up and some is released out of the leaves. This typically happens at night.
With these 5 natural indoor humidifying plants, you will notice tiny droplets of water coming out the leaves at night just like dew on the grass you see first thing in the morning. You notice the humidity outside is greater with the mist rolling in when you see that dew.
Placing your higher maintenance for humidity plants under a larger humidifying plant creates a microclimate in your indoor garden. Thus, finally seeming less high maintenance once you have a good group of plants going like this group for the Monstera plant lovers.
Add an indoor water fountain next to your indoor tropical paradise
Two reasons to start obsessing over indoor plants is to reduce stress and to reconnect us with nature while living in urban areas with paved roads and concrete skyscrapers as our scenery. Maybe you have started with the best indoor plant to begin a garden to do this and are now growing quite the indoor jungle which is so fun! Now it might be time if you have some high maintenance plants to have even more fun decorating with an accessory such as an indoor water fountain.
Indoor water fountains not only increase humidity indoors with the movement of water, it provides that nice calm and tropical sound that just completes your indoor jungle theme. Moving water and that gentle splash is able to release more water vapor into the air than standing water. A water fountain is a very nice addition to high maintenance humidity loving plants.
Place a tray of water next to or under your high humidity requiring plants
I find this to be the least effective way to increase indoor humidity for your tropicals, but it is the least expensive and does add some humidity. The trick to speed up the humidifying process using a tray of water is to make sure the sun heats up the water so placing it in a sunny window works best to help evaporate the water.
You can place some pebbles in the tray and add water so that the water line is below the pebbles. This way, you can sit your plant on top of the pebbles to be as close to the water as possible without the water soaking up through the bottom of the soil. This prevents root rot and soil staying too moist for too long.
Having more of these water trays around the room would increase humidifying efficiency especially with one located in the direct sun.