Plants for a Healthy Home

Interior decorating advice, feng shui, environmentalists, and common sense all suggest that we should add more greenery to our home. Having plants inside can improve air quality, create a calming ambience, and help fill in empty corners.

One problem: we can't seem to find any cat friendly ones.

As I mentioned before in this post, our green cleaning guide lists 7 plants that contribute to good air quality and 6 are toxic. The remaining plant, spider plant, will basically make a cat high (an effect that our black and white cat once discovered and within a day, we had only a tiny little nub of spider plant yet, since he had devoured most of it). We use this ASPCA site for guidance on plant toxicity.

We even ignored the advice, since it seemed our cats ignored the Devil's Ivy (also known as Golden Pothos) plant that we've had for years (it comes from a cutting off a plant that has lived about as long as I have--seriously, this plant and its offspring will live for all eternity).

But when we recently lowered it off a top shelf to a lower shelf on our TV unit, our cats became pretty ill. It took a few weeks for me to realize that they were nibbling on the leaves.

In fact, it seems to me that just about every house plant--at least the common ones sold at Ikea and Home Depot--seem toxic. So besides hanging the plants from the ceiling out of reach of the cats, we need some new suggestions. Do you have pets and plants? What kinds of house plants should we bring into our home*?

*Caveat: I kill pretty much everything, so bonus points for any suggestions that are also hearty.