Green Goodness. A Guide To Bringing the Outdoors Indoors
As city creatures, we sorely miss the company of nature in our maddening urban sprawls. Greening up your living space is a refreshing way to fix this nature deficit. From indoor gardens to living walls, lush pockets of greenery inside your home can be uplifting, oxygenating, and offer a sense of connection with the natural world.
You don’t need acres of space to rub shoulders with plants and flowers. The tiniest nooks and crannies in your apartment can be fitted with foliage. Herb gardens in kitchens, alcoves of potted plants in living rooms, terrariums on your desks and shelves, trellises along windows and walls, gardens tucked away in balconies–colour us green happy.
The wild indoors
Indoor plants not only infuse a state of deep green calm, but also regulate air quality. If you are a lazy waterer, bring home low-maintenance succulents. If you prefer a dense, tropical look, palms, ferns and potted trees grow large and free. Get innovative with indoor garden layouts. Create a wild, luxuriant nook teeming with assorted plants or spread them evenly around the house. Place pots and planters on stairs, window ledges, railings, or on a sideboard. Pepper tables with fresh flower arrangements for an olfactory kick, and hang a birdfeeder in the balcony and channel your rainforest energies into enticing a variety of birds.
Once upon a terrarium
If you don’t want to plant yourself a garden, get yourself a terrarium. Terrariums are open or closed glass containers layered with pebbles and soil, with plants growing inside them. Ideal for apartments with small square footage, these visually transfixing jars and globes can contain whole miniature gardens and forest floors. Easy to maintain and low on water consumption, they are also well-suited for amateur green thumbs. You could either buy yourself a readymade terrarium or make your own. Place it on a coffee table or hang them up in clusters and enjoy the green eye candy.
Grow a green wall
Forget about boring horizontal gardens. Take the high road and opt for a vertical garden instead. Wall-mounted, indoor garden panels rife with herbs, succulents, flowers and pretty foliage are easy to maintain and give a fresh, leafy twist to your walls. Readymade vertical garden kits come with pre-grown plants, and containers made with assorted materials like crates, boxes, and used plastic bottles. Built-in irrigation allows for easy watering.
Herbal kitchen witchery
Create a cosy, herb garden in your kitchen. Use old mugs and colourful utensils to grow mint basil, rosemary and thyme. They not only spruce up the kitchen with a burst of green, and smell good, but also provide a steady supply of fresh cooking ingredients.
Natural Air Fresheners
