How to make your home bloom with artificial plants

Having plants in your home is a big interior design trend, but if you’re not a natural with plants and aren’t blessed with greenfingers, don’t panic! The answer lies in artificial or faux plants.

Artificial plants have come on in leaps and bounds over the years. Forget plastic looking flowers and unattractive leaves, if you’ve not given artificial plants a second glance in years, now’s the time to look again.

There are some wonderful examples of faux plants around and designers and manufacturers have expertly perfected the art of making them look super realistic. In fact, the chances are you’ve seen faux plants used in homes or businesses and not realized they’re not real.

We’ve opted to add a touch of the tropics into our home with the use of a faux Paradise Palm plant. It’s nearly 4ft in size, so quite a substantial piece, but it looks incredibly realistic – so much so, that I’ve been asked how often it needs watering!

It’s glossy and green and a lot of attention has been paid to the production of the leaves, which provide the perfect amount of detail and shading to make them look real. The plants works really well in a shiny metallic copper pot. This pot is part of the Merle set from Barker and Stonehouse.

Aside from looking realistic, there are more other great reasons why artificial plants are worth opting for. Here are six more good reasons why faux plants should be firmly on your decor radar.

1. Artificial plants require minimal care

If you’re short on time and worry about giving the right kind of care to real plants, then the minimal care needed for artificial plants is a godsend. Forget watering, re-potting and dead heading, all you’ll need to do is give it an occasional dust and it will look fresh and green.

2. Artificial plants can be styled and shaped

Artificial plants can be styled and shaped to ensure they provide the look you want. This Paradise Palm, for example, can have all its branches and leaves puffed out to provide a very natural ‘in the wild’ look, or you could keep it more upright if you have limited space.

3. Artificial plants are easy to move and change

If you like to frequently change your décor, or update the look of a room to reflect new seasons, then having artificial plants makes things super easy. They can easily be moved out and replaced with something new, without having to worry about the plant dying.

Real plants don’t always take to being moved to new surroundings, or away from certain temperatures, but artificial plants can easily be used in multiple rooms in your home. There’s no need to worry about issues such as light or temperature – they’ll survive and thrive whatever the location!

4. Artificial plants can be used alongside real plants

Just because artificial plants are much improved these days doesn’t mean you have to stick to only ever using faux options. In fact, they’re great to be able to use alongside real plants. If you’ve got lovely potted plants in your home already, try mixing them up with a few faux options too. Good quality artificial plants are so well made that we bet it will be hard to tell the difference!

5. Artificial plants make great home accessories

In terms of adding style, interest, colour and texture to your home, artificial plants make perfect decorative home accessories. The colours are realistic and can be used to provide contrasting pops of colour, bring interior room schemes to life or add different elements of texture into a scheme.

For example, we love the look of these Paradise Palm leaves against the wooden blinds in the background.

6. Artificial plants last

With minimal care, artificial plants should have a long life ahead of them. Good quality faux plants and trees may seem like a bit of an investment, but compared to the cost and longevity of live plants, they’re a worthy buy.

Keen to give faux plants a go? The Paradise Palm is from Blooming Artificial, a company specialising in artificial plants, trees, flowers and hedging.

With green being one of the key interior decor colours for 2017, we reckon we’ll be seeing plenty more artificial plants being used in home projects and decor in the coming months. What do you think – do you, or would you, use artificial plants as part of your home decor?

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(This is a collaborative post)

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