A Popular Benefit of Houseplants Is a Myth

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“More American households are gardening than ever before (77 percent),” bragged a recent press release from the National Gardening Survey, “and increasingly the gardener is a young man.”

As a young man, I can vouch: I am increasingly the gardener. (I own seven plants.) Of the 6 million Americans who took up gardening in 2016, 5 million were Millennials like me, according to the survey, an annual poll conducted by a nonprofit advocacy group. Gardening is now a $47 billion industry in the United States, with the average gardener household spending a record $503 on plants and materials annually.

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For several years, research really did suggest that houseplants might cleanse the air of certain pollutants. But now most scientists say that’s not right.

“It’s such an alluring and enticing idea,” Elliott Gall, a Portland State University professor, told me. “But the scientific literature shows that indoor houseplants—as would be typically implemented in a person’s home—do very little to clean the air.”

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Waring told me to imagine a small office, 10 feet by 10 feet by eight feet. “You would have to put 1,000 plants in that office to have the same air-cleaning capacity of just changing over the air once per hour, which is the typical air-exchange rate in an office ventilation system,”

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