A nail in my car tire has me sit­ting in the wait­ing room at a local garage, (cough-Canadian Tire-cough) right next to a mag­nif­i­cent eight foot ficus tree in a pot by the floor-to-ceiling win­dow. It’s attrac­tive. It’s green. And it’s plas­tic. Of course.

Sadly, they missed an oppor­tu­nity to make the wait­ing room air qual­ity a lit­tle more healthy, a lit­tle more oxy­genated. This envi­ron­ment sure could use it, the proof being that most Canadians could prob­a­bly iden­tify that famil­iar Canadian Tire smell—the off-gassing from a pro­fu­sion of pla­s­ticky items.

All trees and house­plants take in car­bon diox­ide and give off oxy­gen. It’s the mir­a­cle of Earth, the exchange that made life pos­si­ble on our planet. Let’s have more of it every­where, please. The amount of plate glass win­dows going to waste all over the coun­try makes me weep.

When you’ve got the space, and a great source of nat­ural light, why plas­tic? Yes, there’s the argu­ment that real plants are hard to look after. They’re really not: a slosh of water once a week will keep a ficus tree happy, and the waterer gets a nice dose of oxy­gen while they’re at it. (And that lovely wet-earth smell.)

Indoor trees and plants sim­ply make the indoors a bet­ter place to be. Botanists research­ing plants and space travel dis­cov­ered that house­plants purify the air by absorb­ing tox­ins. Houseplants that are espe­cially good at puri­fy­ing indoor air are spi­der plants, areca palms, Peace Lily (Spathiphyllum) and Sanseveria. Sansevieria, the tall spiky plant also known as Mother In Laws tongue is also one of those hard to kill plants: it’s drought resis­tant. There’s no excuse for not hav­ing a few of those.