Easy house plants - low maintenance plants to take care of
Which house plants are genuinely easy, how much light and water each one needs, and what no easy plant survives.
An easy house plant is one that forgives a missed watering, dry indoor air and less light than it would choose. About eight of them are worth starting with. Here is what each one tolerates, which ones are safe around dogs and cats, and where every easy plant gives up.
What makes a house plant easy to keep alive
A house plant is easy to keep alive when it forgives four things. A watering you forget, the dry air a radiator produces, less light than it would choose, and a pot it has outgrown. Easy care houseplants still need light and water, they just ask for them with less urgency.
Of those four, the one that actually kills is water, and almost always too much of it. Over-watering is the main cause of death in potted plants, because soaked roots rot while the leaves still look healthy. So the easy house plants to keep alive are usually the ones that tolerate dry soil rather than the ones that tolerate a lot of water. The species pages in the plant care guide give the detail per plant.
One distinction worth drawing before you buy anything. A living plant needs light and water. Preserved moss and plastic panels need neither, and they never grow or change either. A living plant will forgive your forgetting. What does not exist is a plant that needs nothing at all.
Eight easy houseplants for beginners
The two toughest on this list are the Snake plant and the pothos, because they tolerate the widest range of light and the longest gap between waterings. The table below covers eight easy house plants for beginners, with what each one takes and whether it is safe around a cat or a dog.
The best easy houseplants share something worth knowing before you pick one. They grow slowly. A ZZ plant survives months of neglect precisely because it does very little with the light it gets, so in two years it will be roughly the same size. That is the trade a beginner is actually making.
Where low maintenance indoor plants actually go in a room
The spot decides the plant, so work out what your spot gives before you choose a species. Two metres back from a north window is a small fraction of the light at the glass, and light falls off faster than it looks like it should. A Pothos that thrives on the sill will sit still on the shelf across the room.
- A windowsill. The brightest spot you have, and the only one where a flowering plant makes sense. Watch for midday sun through south-facing glass, which burns shade-adapted leaves in an afternoon.
- A shelf two metres in. Fine for low maintenance houseplants that tolerate shade, but expect slow growth rather than none. A Spider plant copes here.
- A desk. A small pot holds less soil, so it dries faster than the same species on the floor. Easy small house plants need checking more often, not less.
- A wall. Anything with weight on it gets drilled. One hole, an expanding plug in plasterboard and a standard one in brick, and check what your wall is made of before you start.
Size follows from the spot rather than the other way round. Easy tall house plants need floor space and a stable base, and once a large pot is filled you will not be moving it often.
What even an easy house plant will not survive
No plant survives a room with no daylight at all. An internal bathroom or a windowless hallway is not a low-light spot, it is a dark one, and nothing tolerates it. House plants that are easy to take care of will hold on in a dim corner, but they hold on without growing. They put out smaller leaves, stretch towards the window and slowly come apart over a year. Which species handle low light best is a question with its own answer.
Then there is the radiator. The damage is done by dry air rather than by heat, so a radiator under a shelf dries the soil faster than the plant can drink. The leaf edges go brown and brittle while the surface of the compost still looks damp. Move the pot half a metre away from the heat source and the problem goes.
Two more. Water standing in a saucer rots roots within days, even in the toughest species. And flowering costs more light than leaves do, which is where most lists of easy to care for houseplants quietly overpromise. A Peace lily survives in low light but only flowers in bright indirect light, so in a dark corner you get a living green plant and nothing more.
What we checked on these easy house plants, and what we did not
These are all easy house plants to grow in a flat, and what we checked is where every claim about them comes from. What we did not do is grow all eight species ourselves. The list comes from university extension services that publish their selection criteria, and the pet safety column was checked plant by plant against the ASPCA database rather than assembled from memory.
One thing does depend on the format, and almost nobody mentions it. The less soil a plant has around it, the faster it dries, so common easy house plants forgive less in a shallow container than the same species in a floor pot. In a living wall that difference shows up within days.
A wall pocket like the one on the Living Canvas holds considerably less soil than a 20 cm pot. Check with a finger before watering, and water in measured amounts rather than soaking.
Conclusion - easy house plants
Pick the spot before the plant. Count how many paces it sits from the nearest window, check whether midday sun reaches it, and look for a radiator underneath. Those three answers narrow the table to two or three candidates, and at that point it no longer matters which one photographs best.
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