What Feng Shui Has To Say About Fake Plants And Flowers (2024)

Plants have always had the ability to induce calmness and peace onto us.

It just feels like being with nature and being a part of the natural life that our ancestors had been so accustomed to.

In fact, many people find that just starring at green open meadows outside or even a living plant indoors kind of therapeutic.

While most people naturally love the appearance of plants and the positive visual impact they can have on home interiors, modern home design coupled with hectic lifestyles simply make it impossible, or even irresponsible, to nurture live plants at home when we are unable to care for them.

Dying and dried plants are not going to bring any auspiciousness into the household. They only bring yin energy and release a sense of death into the air.

This is why there is a rising trend of households keeping and setting up fake plastic plants at home for that boost in aesthetic tranquility. They never die and are essentially immortal!

But if you are into feng shui you must have heard about how artificial plants can bring adverse feng shui into your life.

Is there any truth in that?

Feng shui and plants

Feng shui plants and flowers have always been a popular recommendation of practitioners to add color and life into living spaces.

But for the most part, the main reason why they are introduced into home interiors from a feng shui perspective is for the natural wood elemental energy that they bring.

For example, if a living room or an outdoor deck is situated at the east of the house, then the presence of plants or flowers would bring wood energy to spur good luck with health aspects.

This also means that if your intention to welcome potted plants into your home is to bring wood energy, then the placement of plastic plants would do nothing in that effect.

That just bring plastic energy… which unfortunately is not the sixth element in feng shui.

Moreover, another reason to set up live plants in the house is to bring life, which brings yang energy.

Fake plants, or faux plants as some might call it, don’t bring any life into the living space.

They only bring an intention to deceive… which is probably not one of the life aspects you want to enhance at home.

For example, the symbolism of peony flowers is often to bring more suitors for women to find life partners in marriage. So it is believed that a fake peony is only going to symbolize attracting suitors that are undesirable and potentially with hidden agendas behind a decent persona.

So does “plants” that imitate the real thing have a place at home?

Good uses of fake plants

It was mentioned earlier that the main reason plants might be introduced into a house is for the wood energy that innately comes with them.

There is a second purpose that is not that far behind the first.

And that is to block, or hide, poison arrows that emit sha chi.

For example, you might have seen for yourself how shopping malls and residential dwelling sometimes use flowering vines to cover up or wrap around exposed pillars, protruding corners or overhanging beams.

In this respect, dummy plants can promptly do the job of protecting the house and it’s residents from being under the fire of sha chi attack.

Fake flowers and plants these days also look impeccably real. Meaning you don’t lose any points from the aesthetics perspective.

In fact, they can often look more real than real plants!

I myself have a couple of fake green plants sitting in porcelain pots on a ledge of the living room to remove any resemblance of a beam (even though it’s not a beam). It just makes the area look better.

So if you are leaning towards buying plastic flowers or plants for the house, it’s actually a very simple balancing act that you should consider.

Does the sha chi the plants are supposed to protect you from carry more weight or does the unnatural nature of plastic plants more disturbing?

I think the answer is obvious.

Saying that, if you are willing to care for real plants, then go for it.

If you find caring for them too tedious, but find that they offer the best and simplest solution to remedy poison arrows, then go for it.

Sometimes, some spaces within the house are perfect to place potted plants or vases with stalks of flowers. But there is no natural light in those spaces for living plants to nurture.

In this case, faux plants might be the practical option to go for.

What you do have to avoid is to allow fake plants to have an overbearing presence in the space in question.

That’s just bad feng shui.