Best Houseplant To Buy In March

March is still locked in winter chill but there's a distinct feeling that, down the road in a few weeks, spring is getting dressed for the dance. This winter-spring cusp month is a good moment to relax, clear your mind, and exit gracefully from hibernation. Select a houseplant for March that will help you do just that.

And we've found it for you: the perfect houseplant for March is compact lavender. ​One of the herbs renowned for relaxation, a lavender houseplant in the bedroom will help you clear your mind every morning and drift off into sweet dreams each night.​

Lavender is a delight for the senses, with its long magic wands of royal purple blooms and soft, gray-green foliage. And with that heady fragrance, it's sweet and powerful at the same time. If you're used to tall waist-high shafts of lavender in the garden, you may wonder whether lavender can work as a houseplant. Believe us, it will.

The trick to indoor lavender is using the dwarf compact lavender. It offers the same romantic good looks and heavenly scent as its taller relations, but in a size that fits easily on a window sill or bedside table.

You can buy lavender container plants at your garden store or online, or you can create and pot up your own. Select a dwarf cultivars like 'Goodwin Creed Gray' (​Lavandula x ginginsii​ 'Goodwin Creek Gray') with its dramatic, finely toothed silver foliage and deep purple flowers, or English Lavender 'Little Lottie' (​Lavandula​ ​angustifolia​ 'Little Lottie') with extremely showy, deeply fragrant soft pink and white flower spikes.

You can find 'Goodwin Creed Gray' online from Monrovia, or in a glazed pot of woven basket from White Flower Farms. Another good one to check out: Bonnie Plants' Ellagance lavender with fragrant, deep blue flowers. Buy a little four-pack through Amazon or an individual plant from Walgreens. Amazon also offers a fragrant lavender plant in a wood and wicker basket.

Lavender is native to the Mediterranean area of Europe where it grows in full sun areas, so reserve your sunniest window sill for your houseplant. If you are potting it up yourself, pick light, well-draining soil and a pot with quite a few drain holes.

Water the plant well until water steams from the drain holes then don't water again until the soil has dried. It's better to underwater than give the plant too much, but ideally you can balance between the extremes.