Check this out: Most of our favorite houseplants hail from tropical rainforests with an average humidity range between 77 percent and 88 percent.

You’d never think of sticking that plant outside in the Sahara desert, right? No way — not with an average 25 percent humidity range.

Yet we think nothing of bringing them into our homes, where the average humidity is 13 to 15 percent.

Yes, lower than the Sahara

Sure, many houseplants do fine. Not as well as they do in their native environment, but they survive. Some, however, require high humidity levels to thrive.

Please get this: Misting your plants doesn’t work

Ignore the advice to “mist” your plants that you will find on too many websites. Anyone dispensing this advice has no business dispensing plant advice, period.

The only way that misting your houseplant will help raise humidity for it is if you sit next to it and mist it every two or three minutes, 24 hours a day.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t truly effective ways to increase the moisture in the air that your tropical plants crave.

Temperature and Humidity

Keep the home’s temperature on the cool side if you can tolerate it. A plant in a warm room loses more moisture than a plant in a cooler room.

Try the two-pot method

Place your potted plant inside a pot that’s slightly larger. Fill the gaps between the pots with pre-moistened sphagnum peat moss and add more water when the moss dries out. Group your plants

Grouping plants together creates a micro-environment, raising humidity levels around them. Naturally if there are bugs on any of them, or you suspect a disease among them, exclude those from the group.

Jerry Norbury via Flickr/ CC BY-ND 2.0

Create a humidity tray

While a humidity tray raises the humidity level around the plant only about 2% to 4%, if you don’t have a humidifier the tray is better than nothing.

Fill a large tray with pebbles and then fill it with water until only the tops of the pebbles are exposed and dry. Place the plant on top of the dry pebbles.

Add water as it evaporates, being careful to allow the plant to sit on dry pebbles, never in the water. We like these, at Amazon.com.

The larger the tray, by the way, the better. 

Use a room humidifier

 This is a bit of a no-brainer but it sure beats sitting next to your plant 24 hours a day to squirt it with water from a bottle.

Humidifiers aren’t all that expensive and they’ll not only help your plant, but humans as well. Check out this highly-rated and inexpensive humidifier at Amazon.com.