Pet-Friendly Plants & Flowers for Your Pet Filled Home

Written by Kelsey W.

Some of the most beautiful plants in the world are also the most toxic when it comes to house pets like cats and dogs. Decorating your home and garden with beautiful plants when you have pets means it’s essential to know whether a plant is safe for a rambunctious puppy, a curious cat, or a beloved family pet.

Pets like cats and dogs aren’t particularly attracted to eating plants, but may have an affinity for chewing on grass or investigating plants with a few chews on a leaf or flower. Therefore, it’s important to keep an eye on your pet’s activities whenever they’re around your home, whether you just have a big patch of grass in the front yard or a whole line of container plants along the back deck.

Designing your home’s gardens and plantings with an eye toward pet-safe greenery can help you keep your pets healthy, as well as ensure the safety of any random visitors to your home, whether it’s a neighbor’s dog, a cat from a nearby feral community, or a small wild animal. 

Pet-safe plants make your home safe for everyone who visits while also making your home beautiful. Let’s explore some of the best non-toxic plants for your pets, as well as how to keep your home safe for your pets while creating a garden or a new landscaping design.

Even Pet-Friendly Plants Can Upset a Pet’s Stomach

Before we delve into some safe plants for your pets, it’s important to note that a pet can get an upset stomach or experience some digestive issues even when they consume a plant considered safe. It’s important to teach pets that the plants growing in your yard aren’t food, even if they’re non-toxic.

However, should one of your pets decide to take a few bites of a plant in your yard or on your balcony, you probably don’t need to worry about them unless you’ve recently used a pesticide on the plant (which you may want to avoid anyway if you have pets).

In most cases, a cat will only accidentally knock a plant over and won’t actually try to consume it, but there are exceptions. Similarly, a dog might try to eat the grass in your front yard, but they aren’t normally drawn to plants as food unless they’re untrained or acting a bit wild.

Occasionally, your pets might chew on grass because they have some digestive issues, so if you have a pet that won’t stop chewing on your front lawn, you might want to take a look at their diet. In other cases, a pet might chew on grass simply because they’re bored.

Whenever you bring a new plant home, even if you’re absolutely sure it’s a pet-friendly plant, you’ll want to keep an eye on your pets and the new plant, to make sure everyone and everything is getting along. Your pet may sniff the new addition to your yard but should ignore it after a short while.

Beautiful Options for Pet-Safe Plants and Non-Toxic Flowers

Virtually any plant can cause some problems when ingested by your pet, but let’s assume that your pets aren’t otherwise obsessed with munching on every plant you bring back to your house from your local garden center. From towering trees to flowering annuals, you have many pet-safe options that are also quite at home in sunny Southern California.

Pet-Friendly Houseplants

If you have pets, all the plants inside your home should definitely sit on the pet-safe list, and we’re lucky in Southern California that succulents grow so well because a wealth of beautiful succulents are quite safe for cats and pets and grow wonderfully in a windowsill or other bright place in your home.

Here are some cat-safe succulents:

• Haworthia
• Burro’s Tail
• Living Rocks
• Echeveria
• Frithia
• Pleiospilos

Other ideal indoor plants for your pet-safe home include bromeliads, which are sold in all sorts of gorgeous colors and patterns, as well as Christmas cactuses, which usually bloom sometime between Thanksgiving and February. 

You can put an orchid in your bathroom, and it won’t harm your pet unless it decides to eat the plant right down to the nubbins (just keep an eye on your pet around the plant to make sure they’re not likely to devour your new plants). 

Other great washroom plants are ferns, many of which are pet-safe like the Bird’s Nest Fern and Maidenhair fern. Your pets will also fare just fine around African violets, bamboo plants, and a few palm plants that grow well indoors including the Areca palm and Kentia palm.

Pet-Friendly Outdoor Landscaping Plants

Whether you’ve got a tidy balcony or an expansive backyard, you can welcome all sorts of non-toxic pet-friendly plants to your Southern California home. Depending on the location of your home and whether it makes sense for your home’s natural climate, one of the prettiest non-toxic plants is the hibiscus. 

Just make sure to avoid the Rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) variety because that particular hibiscus can cause some stomach upsets to cats and dogs. Another beautiful flowering plant for your outdoor space is White Jasmine (Jasminum officinale), which is considered non-toxic for pets. 

Just avoid the related jasmine plant known as Arabian Jasmine (Jasminum sambac), which can cause stomach upsets and isn’t really native to Southern California anyway. If you don’t have the room for a Jasmine plant, which can spread quite a lot along a wall or outdoor space, you might want to consider a fuchsia plant for your pet-safe option.

Not only are fuchsia plants non-toxic for dogs and cats, but they’re also an ideal flowering plant when you don’t have a lot of space and need to stick with some container plants. Fuchsia looks gorgeous in a hanging planter and is an ideal addition to a balcony.

Can You Plant Unsafe Plants Outside if You Only Have Indoor Pets?

As you search for beautiful plants to fill your home, yard, balcony, or patio, you may wonder whether it’s okay to plant a giant row of oleanders along the side of your home if you have indoor cats. Do you run the risk of poisoning your cats just because you have oleanders growing outside the home?

In fact, oleanders are pretty toxic to a fair number of animals, so if you have escape artists for your feline friends, you may want to consider your outdoor plantings very carefully. Some cats will only sit in the window and sleep all day, while others may look for every opportunity to slip out and explore the outdoors.

On that same note, some breeds of dogs are notorious for escaping, and will even create tunnels underneath the fence to find other places to run and jump and play. Artic breeds like Siberian huskies are well-known for their inability to remain planted for any length of time and their joy of escaping.

Should you choose to plant something in your yard that might harm an indoor pet, you can reduce the likelihood of a pet wandering outside or trying to escape by giving them some toys or enrichment activities so they’re not so keen to get outside. That usually means frequent walks for the husky and motorized cat toys for the felines.

Yes, There Is a Thing Called “Dogscaping”

Not only can you infuse your home with pet-safe plants, but you can also design your landscaping to offer a friendly environment for your canine friends. If you have cats, too, they will certainly enjoy the care you put into creating a pet-safe environment, whether that’s indoors or out.

The first step to creating pet-friendly landscaping is looking at your pet’s behavior and comparing that to the natural design needs of your yard. Just as you might pay attention to the pattern of the sun and shade in your lawn to choose your plants, you would look at where your pets like to play, sleep, and chill for design ideas.

For example, if you have a small dog that might get caught in the bushes, you might want to avoid bushes with low-hanging branches and leaves, so your short dog can trot around safely. Obviously, you’ll want those bushes to also possess non-toxic leaves so they’re safe to plant in a yard inhabited by pets.

Another consideration is whether you have a senior animal that might require shade during the summer or a northern breed like a malamute or a Samoyed that has a lot of fur and needs some cooling. You can create areas of shade for your pet that will keep them from overheating should they want to hang out in the yard (and many of those big northern breeds love being outside) during the summer.

Bringing pet-safe plants, bushes, and trees into your home is the ideal time to look at the larger picture of “dogscaping” and how designing a pet-safe home may also mean delving into the very landscaping design of your home or the arrangement of plants inside your house.

Green Thumb Nursery Can Help You Choose Pet-Safe Plants & Flowers

Flowering plants, beautiful bushes, and inviting trees will make your yard look beautiful, but are those plants safe for your pets? If you’re going to welcome a new pet to your home and want to make sure the plants in your home are ready for your furry friend, visit your local Green Thumb Nursery in Southern California for ideas, advice, and inspiration for pet-safe plants.

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