A splash of nature ushers a welcome freshness into any space, be it a plant for your kitchen, home office, living room, or bathroom. The perfect platform to showcase a plant, you don’t need to invest in custom shelving – a simple bookcase or a floating shelf works beautifully.
Beyond styling up the perfect shelfie, plants purify the air, so the added health-giving properties of indoor plants bring an extra dimension to their enjoyment.
Here, we’ve collected inspiration from all over the globe with the latest ideas on how to display your indoor plants on shelves. Take a tour with us and bring the outdoors in for an Insta-worthy transformation.
1. Keep it simple
Start with a curated selection of plants and pots on your shelf. Where leaves are small and trailing, keep the color and style of your pots consistent. These earthy tones of terracotta and natural clay let the plants take center stage and avoid visual clutter.
2. Bedroom bliss
Tumbling plants on a shelf above the bed transform this room into an urban jungle. To achieve this look, choose bedroom plants with a contrasting mix of leaf shapes and sizes – large and small, high and low. Mingle different pots and planters along the shelf in neutral tones to keep things interesting.
3. Colourful kids
Faux plants sometimes work just as well in a setting – particularly where there is low light or little chance of regular care and watering. Decorating kids’ rooms can be fun and doesn’t have to be all toys and brightly colored blocks. Two tiny pot plants add movement and texture to this colorful bedroom and are kept high away from enquiring hands!
4. TV dreams
This fabulous setup cleverly solves the problem of how to avoid a TV dominating the living room. Having a television that doubles as the artwork is a fantastic start, but surrounding the large screen with shelving filled with a cascade of plants growing down and across ties everything together. Pots are kept all white to keep things visually clean.
5. Lush living
Custom curved brickwork and a cascading indoor plant make this fireplace Insta-worthy. Smaller specimens sit alongside books, objects, and artwork, whilst larger potted plants on the floor draw the eye upward and blend with the arrangement on the shelf, amplifying the effect.
6. Verdant display
Trailing devil’s ivy, a Zanzibar gem, and other indoor plants take pride in place upon light timber shelving in this contemporary dining room. The shelving breaks up a large expanse of wall in the dining room. Placing indoor plants in the dining room or kitchen also gives the suggestion of fresh herbs.
7. Mix-and-match
Many plant varieties are timeless, defy trends and transcend design styles. In this living room, an elegant orchid (popular in Hamptons-style homes) has been styled with variegated devil’s ivy (popular in contemporary and Scandi-style homes), a maidenhair fern (popular in mid-century modern homes) and a Peperomia. It just goes to show that grouping indoor plants together always looks good, no matter what your interior decorating style is.
8. Short on shelves
If you’re renting or don’t have any shelving suitable for plant display, think outside the frame and press your windowsill into service. Line your sun-loving plants along its edge and they’ll thank you for the availability of light with bumper growth.
9. Bathroom botanicals
Many indoor plants thrive in the bathroom, so bring a touch of greenery to your morning routine by placing a trailing plant in the shower niche. Just be sure to measure the depth of the niche carefully and select a pot that won’t be a fall hazard.