1920s: Plants with Artful Elegance
When home environments became more plant-friendly in the Roaring Twenties, houseplants soon became part of the lives of your average homeowner. Low-light plants such as graceful ferns quickly rose in popularity, often placed upon wrought-iron pedestals. Their tidy green foliage served as the perfect foil for the era’s geometric Art Deco-inspired furniture, textiles, and patterns.
1930s: Luxurious Leaves
The Depression years didn’t stop people from refining their indoor gardens. Along with English ivy everywhere, the expanding repertoire of popular houseplants included schismatoglottis (shown above, right), dracaena, screw pine, grape ivy, and fiddle-leaf fig. And while furniture and decor became more spare than the previous decade, design became a bigger consideration for displaying houseplants. Glazed ornamental pots were newly arriving on the market and furniture was being forged to hold light-loving houseplants such as cacti where they could bask in the most sunbeams.
1940s: Statement Pieces
Wartime shortages of metals pushed wood into the limelight for home furnishings and decor, with houseplants acting as a natural complement. But a token plant or two wasn’t enough, you needed a whole row of snake plants or an overflowing dish garden to really make a statement. Plus, with home sizes shrinking in the post-war years, using houseplants to separate or define spaces helped create the illusion of roominess.
1950s: Maximalist Plants
Baby boomers were all about maximizing the indoor experience, and plants were a big part of that in the 1950s–often quite literally. Tree-sized specimens with eye-catching foliage such as parlor palms, philodendrons, and fiddle-leaf figs with architectural appeal ruled the day. People were also getting into creating collections of African violets and versatile begonias (BHG even advised at the time: “You can fit begonias into either Traditional or Contemporary rooms simply by changing their containers.”).
1960s: Collectable Plants
As fluorescent lights suitable for home use became more available, any space could become an indoor garden. The dimensions of houseplants were downsized when smaller plants such as eyelash begonias and orchids were tucked under lights and indoor gardeners continued building their collections. Though lumens were no longer a limitation, houseplants faded more into the background as calming counterpoints to the sixties’ otherwise loud colors and patterns everywhere else you looked.
1970s: Plants to Hang Out With
In the seventies, we let it all hang out with the fad for trailing and hanging plants. Of course, macrame made it easier to let your houseplants come tumbling down, but any type of rope or chain was enlisted as plants took over homes. Hoyas led the inundation, but spider plants, Christmas cactus, ferns, and other groovy plants were liberally draped around too.
1980s: Flashy Flowers
With all those sliding glass doors letting the sunshine in came a flood of light–loving tropical plants with brightly colored flowers. Anthurium, bird of paradise, and flowering ginger were top choices for adding a touch of floral flamboyance that could match the vibrant decor of the times. And for those without room for these larger plants, BHG recommended saucer gardens that could add “a rainbow of color in a scrap of space” like the one below filled with primroses, begonias, cineraria, and other brilliant blooms.
1990s: Nostalgic Houseplants
Although the crazy quilt-look of the 1970s was no longer in vogue, hanging plants and other nostalgia-inducing specimens such as ivies and hoyas were again having their day as living works of art. Meanwhile, everyone wanted to try and fail with a temperamental weeping ficus tree (Ficus benjamina, shown above), but the houseplant cognoscenti chose its more easy-going cousin, Ficus maclellandii ‘Alii’ (shown below).
2000s: Indoor Gardens
Someone shrank the houseplants into terrariums as growing tiny plants under glass in a cloche, Wardian case, or canning jar became wildly popular. Unlike earlier terrariums that were more like science experiments, these versions were works of art. Simultaneously, warmth and humidity-loving cape primroses (Streptocarpus) and moth orchids hit their stride, along with sunrooms for displaying them.
2010s: Fancy Foliage Plants
Maximizing your indoor experience was the name of the game for Millennials. A whole new wave of foliage plants flooded the market so that formerly ho-hum Chinese evergreens, dracaenas, and crotons were decked out with jazzy markings. And boosted by social media and countless design magazines, the fiddle-leaf fig was pushed from dusty corners into superstardom.
2020s: Big Tropical Houseplants
Plants with strong architectural lines and big leaves rule, like alocasias with arrow-shaped foliage, split-leaf philodendrons with striking leaf patterns, and of course, the mighty monstera. These big, bold plants are often grouped together for an indoor jungle effect. What’s your guess for which houseplants will be trendy in the 2030s?
