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On table top or window sill the greatest virtues and advantages of this plant would be vastly reduced in value.

For example, certain plants can be employed in the most practical manner to make a room appear to be longer or shorter, taller or squatter, lighter or darker. Plants can be used to bring out and highlight the beauties of a picture on the wall or to disguise a dreary view or a shabby piece of furniture. They can be so placed and trained that they act as a living screen or frame.

Vivid colours, yellow, orange, white and brilliant red are advancing. They come out to meet you and so tend to make a room appear to be shorter if placed at the far end. And conversely, dark colors, mainly greens of course, are receding and tend to look farther away than they really are, thus lengthening a short room. A tall rubber plant or fatshedera will make a room look higher, for the eye tends to follow the growth upwards, while a high ceiling can appear to be lower if horizontal growing plants catch the eye.

An impression of warmth is given if a wall is covered with the trained tendrils and shoots of a growing plant or if warm colors are used. And as might be expected, a hot summer day can be cooled indoors by the decorative use of cool greens, purples and dark colors in general.

Regard, for example, the cissus, rhoicissus, ivy, several philodendrons and the dramatic monstera, to say nothing of the huge and rampant tetrastigma. All of these can be trained to cover a wall, to climb to the ceiling and follow the wall around the room. One tetrastigma in our possession once grew near the front door, climbed to the ceiling, was led along to the stairway, climbed up the stair well and was stopped just before it invaded one of the bedrooms. One ten year old cissus still grows happily in a Victorian washbowl without drainage holes. It frames an arch between kitchen and dining-room and shows no signs of its hardships suffered when building operations dictated its removal and storage, twisted and tangled like a cat-teased ball of knitting wool, for several months before being unravelled and trained once again along its almost invisible supports of cotton.

Remember that warm air travels upwards and the area immediately under the ceiling is likely to be both warmer and drier than at foot level, so where plants are to grow tall or be placed high, increase the relative humidity of the room slightly for their benefit.