How to Decorate a Living Room with Plants: 25 Ideas to Up Your Greenery Game

Plant lovers unite! Today we’re showcasing indoor greenery ideas that’ll have you gasping. If you’ve ever wondered how to decorate a living room with plants, or want to take your plant styling game to the next level, this post has you covered.

Below we’re going to show you 25 ways to level-up your living room greenery. Because just having a plant in a pot isn’t going to cut it. Not when you can hang it from the ceiling, cluster it around your TV, or create an indoor jungle around an armchair.

Scroll on and take in the greenery in all its glory. And drop a comment at the end of the post letting us know how you decorate a living room with plants at your place. We’d love to hear your ideas.

1. Store All Your Plants on a Dedicated Shelf

Let’s start our living room plant decorating ideas with a real easy one: choosing one area in the room to have all of the plants live together at.

This approach brings with it a real sense of drama and impact as you walk into the space. Rather than having plants dotted around the living room, you have them together to create a greater focal point.

We have a separate post that shows you how to create the look above here if you need.

2. Place Plants on a Floating Shelf Above the TV

There’s no greater moment than seeing a crawler plant like a Pothos (Devil’s Ivy) trailing across a floating shelf above a TV. Even better if it drapes over the side and cascades down the wall.

Pothos are super easy to care for as well, so you’re onto a low-maintenance winner here. They can tolerate a little neglect and can trail for metres and metres under the right conditions.

3. Try Plants Styled on a Fireplace Mantle

Your fireplace mantle is prime real estate for styling indoor plants on top of.

You can choose to have just one or two small moments alongside a leaning piece of art and candles, for example (as you can see above), or go all out and cover the entire thing with an array of smaller pots side-by-side.

Half the fun is in the experimentation. It all comes down to how visually calm or busy you’d like the scene to look.

4. Let Crawling Plants Trail Across the Wall

There are some great (and super affordable) decorative trellis’ you can mount to your wall, made from materials like bamboo, that allow crawler plants to be trained in a particular direction.

We love this brand on Etsy if you’re looking for a supplier to shop from.

This is a great solution for renters too as the trellis is so lightweight and can be installed with Command temporary hooks. It’s also a great solution for covering bland white walls if you don’t want to commit to painting them.

5. Place Lush Plants on a Treasured Sideboard

For reasons unknown, lush green plants styled on vintage sideboards just seem to look way more amazing than on modern furniture pieces. It must be the contrast of new and old, earthy and weathered.

Regardless, why not try this in your living room if you have a sideboard in the space? You can go for a less-is-more approach here or go wild and cover the entire top panel. The choice is yours, and both options look stunning.

6. Plants in Front of a Mirror = Double the Greenery

When considering how to decorate with plants in a living room that’s tight on space, here’s a trick. Place plants in front of a mirror (leaner or wall fixed, small or large) and you’ll instantly double the amount of greenery you have in the room.

This is a visual trick that works wonders in giving you the feel of more plants in the room without actually clogging up the space with too many items on the floor. Where there’s a will, there’s a way!

Oh, and if you need, here’s more tips on making a small living room look bigger.

7. Set Plants Against a Dark Wall for Added Impact

This plant decorating hack first presented itself on a project where we painted the fence outside black. We were amazed by how much the green plants popped against this deeper, darker tone. The same goes for your indoor plants too.

Try painting a feature wall in your home black, dark grey, or deep blue, and see how much more beautiful the plants look against it. Trust us when we say, you will not regret this bold colour moment.

8. Cluster like Crazy on a Dedicated Plant Table

If you’re decorating with plants in a living room that’s larger, you might want to opt for a dedicated plant table in the corner of the room, or by a window. It’s actually better to have it in a spot you move through, so you can stop and admire the zen the plants bring to your life each day.

The key to having this look feel as lovely as possible is to have the entire table filled, with a variety of different plants types, and at different heights. Do this and you living room is going to look stunning.

9. Create Your Own Plant Terrarium

When it comes to decorating a living room with plants, it’s important to think outside the box. Or, rather, think inside the glass. We’re talking about terrariums; those gorgeous little mini worlds you can create with plants inside a glass bowl or jar.

Terrariums can sit on coffee or side tables, be clustered at multiple heights on a sideboard, or even suspend from the ceiling if you want to create an unexpected design moment. Creating one yourself is actually super fun and there are heaps of tutorials online.

10. Hang Plants from the Ceiling

How to decorate with plants in a living room that’s small, you ask. Well, the solution is simple: we must go up! You can still pull off this idea in a larger space too, don’t worry.

All you need is a ceiling hook and a decorative plant holder made from something like macrame (or these leather ones) and you have a relaxed bohemian vibe going on in your living room with minimal effort required.

You may, however, need a step ladder to water the plants each week. Just making sure you’re fully prepared to scale to new heights!

11. Showcase Plants Across a Windowsill

Something that gets our little designer hearts fluttering here at TLC Interiors is a windowsill in an older home covered side to side with lush green plants.

It brings a charm, some whimsy, and a sense of nostalgia that just makes us want to move out of our modern apartment into a space with more character.

But fear not, decorating with plants across a windowsill will still look amazing if your home is modern like ours. We find the more random the placement is, and the more varied the plants are, the better the whole scene will look.

12. Style a Multi-Level Plant Trio

In decades gone by there just weren’t the plant pot suppliers there are now. How lucky are we to be able to get so many more plant styling products these days? Case in point: amazing planter pots you can stage at different levels.

This is a great way to fill sections or bare wall in your living room (everyone seems to have at least one bare wall going on!) when a piece of furniture just won’t work.

When you have the three plants at different heights and of different species it just looks so lush and serene and fills the spot perfectly.

13. Place Plants on the TV Unit

If you consider yourself a crazy plant lady or lad (the crazy cat lady title has been retired) you’re probably already styling plants around your TV like in the image above. If you’re yet to try it though, consider this a sign that the time is now.

Modern tech, despite what the makers of it say, is always a little heavy. The TV is literally a big black box in your living room, after all. To remedy this dominance, lush green plants either side of the TV set is a great way to balance things out.

Here’s the rest of our ideas for concealing an ugly TV set, btw.

14. Use Plants as a Room Divider

We love an open plan living and dining room, don’t get us wrong. But it’s nice to zone the spaces so they feel connected, yet separate. To delineate the line between the living room and dining room, why not use plants?

There are some truly breathtaking plant room dividers on the market right now, and boy do they address both looks and function.

You can do it on a budget though if you wanted to, simply by purchasing an affordable metal shelf that’s not too tall and pop your pots inside it so you can view them from both sides.

15. Put a Statement Plant Behind the Sofa

Sectional sofas are great in a living room. We specify them for our clients all the time. But sometimes they can feel rather dominant. It’s a lot of the one colour and fabric in the space.

A nice way to bring some calm organic vibes to the room is to pull the sofa off the wall a little and place a tall plant behind it. This not only breaks up the look of all that fabric, but it injects some zen into the zone.

Above you can see the plant is behind a standard three-seater sofa, but the same concept applies for larger couches too.

16. Create a Jungle-Like Reading Nook

If you’re not fortunate enough to have a large yard covered in greenery, or even a balcony you can unwind on, then it’s time to create a jungle retreat inside your home. The way to do it: the plant-covered reading nook.

We’ve explained exactly what you need to create a cosy reading nook before on the blog. The added step here though, is to bring plants into the corner.

You’ll want some large ones that fold over the chair a little to create a canopy feel, and then some smaller ones around your chair to cuddle the space a little. We can feel the calm setting in already!

17. Style Plants in Wall-Mounted Planters

Wondering how to decorate with plants in a living room when you’re on a budget? The answer is affordable wall-mounted planters that you can install on smaller walls in your home.

This is a great idea if you have little pockets in your living room that aren’t quite big enough for art but need a little something to take the bland away.

You can spend as little or as much as you like on planters like these. The ones you see above are around $85 but there are others on Etsy for under 35 bucks.

18. Bring in Texture with Decorative Baskets

Decorating a living room with plants is about more than just buying the plant and finding the right spot for it. You have to take it a step further and consider how important the pot the plant sits in is!

A stylish and affordable solution is to pop your plants in baskets. These holders can be picked up from places like IKEA, Bunnings, Pillow Talk and so many other retailers.

The baskets will bring some necessary texture to your living room so the space feels warm and inviting.

19. Display Plants in a Coloured Planter Boxes

Metal planters boxes, in a variety of colours, have become so popular of late. And you can see why, right? They look so freakin’ good and get all of your plants off the ground together in the one spot.

The one above is from RJ Living and while it only has one plant in it here, you can imagine how easy it would be to add more.

The best part is you can keep all the plants in their individual pots with the draining holes intact. This makes taking them outside to water super easy if you need.

20. Plants on Coffee Table = Elevated Vignette

We can’t forget about the best piece of plant styling real estate in your living room: the coffee table. We’ve shown you how to style a coffee table before on the blog, and as you well know, a plant is the ultimate way to finish off the scene.

We love elevating a smaller plant, in a lovely pot, on top of a stack of books. Or, have it sit directly on the table top with a candle and coasters beside it (or a vase and books, as seen above).

You could even house a number of smaller plants together on a tray on the coffee table. This keeps the greenery ample but contained, so it looks marvellous rather than messy.

21. Let Plants Shine on a Side Table

OK, so you’ve got the coffee table covered, but you also need to consider side tables as your dear friends when it comes to decorating your living room with plants.

Sure you want space to sit a drink down. But outside of that you are free to put a great big plant on top of it to fill most of the table.

We find that one solo plant looks nicer than clusters here, unless you have a large side table in the image above.

22. Fill an Awkward Corner with Tall Plants

We’re always getting asked how to deal with awkward corners at home, and one of the the solutions, which we shared in this post on filling awkward corners, was to let one large lush plant fill the space.

Sure, you could try a ladder, or a table, or a lamp. But we feel a tall plant taking centre stage in a corner is a far nicer way to get more air in the room and resolve the empty space perfectly.

A fiddle leaf fig is a great idea here (we love the look above!), even though we’ve only recently figured out the secret to keeping them alive.

23. Showcase Branches in Unexpected Places

This post on how to decorate with plants in a living room has been pretty focussed on placing pots about the space. But, here’s another way to get greenery into the room but in an unexpected way: branch displays!

The concept here is simple: pop a collection of branches in a tall vase on a side table, for example. Or, as you can see above, bring in a fallen branch from outside and pop it alongside other everyday items in a storage container.

This is a more temporary measure, but it allows you to keep things fresh on the style front in your living room as branches are constantly moving in and out.

24. Go Big with an Indoor Vertical Garden

If you’re a go-big-or-go-home kinda person, we admire your gusto! Sometimes you just want to go the whole hog and commit to a major design moment on your walls. Well, this plant decorating idea is for you: the large vertical garden.

You’ll have to have the right conditions inside your home to pull this one off, but good Lord does it look amazing when done correctly. Would you try this idea at your place? Let us know in the comments below.

25. Break All the Rules and Have Plants Everywhere

We’re at the end of our tips on how to decorate a living room with plants, and we’ve saved the best idea for last: break the rules and let your plants run wild.

There’s something so wonderfully rebellious about a living room filled with tonnes of plants. Some are near the window, some hanging from the ceiling, and some taking pride of place in the middle of the room.

If you’re this kind of plant lover, we salute you!

Have you found these ideas for decorating a living room with plants helpful? We sure hope so. Drop a comment below and share with us which idea you’re going to run with at your place.