Adding plants to your home can bring life to spaces that feel bare. It’s common to see house plants in bedrooms, living rooms, and hallways, but there’s more you can do to let nature into your home! Bathrooms provide a unique environment for plants that thrive in warm, humid, and dark spaces, giving you the opportunity to bring some tropical fauna into your home. Bathrooms are especially perfect for tropical plants when they’re well insulated with waterproof wall panels.

Having bathroom plants doesn’t just bring an interesting visual element and create a relaxing atmosphere, they can also help to control humidity by taking moisture out of the air and can help to eliminate toxins like formaldehyde that are commonly found in bathroom cleaners.

But what are the best plants for a bathroom?

Air plants (Tillandsia)

Like their name suggests, air plants don’t have roots, so they rely on air rather than the moisture in the ground for their water. They’re found naturally in diverse environments like equatorial tropical rainforests, high mountain ranges, dry rocky regions, and swamps.

As they’re rootless, they can be displayed in a variety of ways from being placed on a flat surface, hanging from a wall, or suspended in the air with a piece of clear fishing line.

Peace lily

Peace lilies are also perfect for the bathroom and are super low-maintenance. They need minimal watering, prefer partial shade, can tolerate fluorescent lights, and like temperatures around 25-30°.

They’re also known as one of the top indoor plants for cleaning air, breaking down and neutralising toxins like benzene, formaldehyde, and carbon monoxide.

On top of all of this, they’re good looking plants with neutral coloured flowers, meaning they can complement many different styles of bathroom décor.

Boston fern

The Boston fern is another great bathroom plant, preferring high humidity, cool air, and indirect light over other environments. Native to the South American tropical regions, these ferns also help to clean the air of pollutants and are easy to look after.

Because they like wet environments, the bathroom is the perfect place for a Boston fern. However, it is sometimes recommended that the soil in the pot is kept damp by soaking it around once a month. Handily, the leaves on your Boston fern will begin to turn yellow if it’s not humid enough, so you’ll know to turn the heat on the shower up.

Snake plant

Snake plants are some of the most resilient and low maintenance house plants there are. They’re able to thrive in low-light and low or high-humidity environments. There are a number of different varieties that you can choose from, including the most popular which is known as ‘mother-in-law’s tongue’. White snake plants which can grow up to 3 feet tall, whilst rhino grass snake plants have red tinted leaves.

As is the case with several of the best bathroom house plants, snake plants also have air purifying qualities which mean they can remove toxins like formaldehyde from the air and keep your bathroom fresh.