The Ultimate Guide to Which Plants Love Your Home’s Indoor Light
Growing houseplants is a fun and rewarding way to add some greenery to your space, but it’s not without a learning curve. One of the biggest challenges is ensuring that your plants get the right amount of light. Your home has varying levels of natural light, making it tricky to know where your houseplants will thrive. To clear up the confusion, I worked with two houseplant pros to create the ultimate indoor plant light guide.
Whether you’re new to growing houseplants or are simply used to outdoor gardening, understanding the different types of indoor light (e.g., direct and indirect) and how to adjust them for your plants can make all the difference in your success. As someone who has grown houseplants for about 10 years, figuring out what type of light is in the different parts of my home has been a game changer.
This guide breaks down the five types of light you’ll often hear referenced by plant pros — from brightest to darkest. Here’s everything you need to know about lighting for houseplants, so you can confidently grow healthy plants in any indoor space.
Direct Light
Direct light is the brightest type of natural light in the home. It’s considered any spot where sunbeams fall directly on a plant’s leaves. As such, you’ll usually find direct light within a foot or so of a bright window.
“The farther from the window you get, the more diffused the light and the less intense it is,” says Justin Hancock, a horticulturist at Costa Farms in Florida. “So, having sun beaming on your plant two feet from a window will be softer than if it’s right in the window,” he adds.
It’s also important to note that afternoon light tends to be more intense than morning or evening sunlight, and direct sunlight in the summer is far stronger than in the winter.
Where to Find Direct Light
You won’t find direct sunlight coming through every window of your home. Generally, south-facing and west-facing windows offer the best and most consistent direct light (as long as there’s not a big tree or building directly outside the window).
That said, east-facing windows can offer brief periods of direct light, particularly in the morning. However, since morning light tends to be less intense than afternoon light, an east-facing window may not be ideal for sun-loving plants.
Plants That Love Direct Light
Hancock notes that many houseplants can grow in direct sun locations indoors as long as they’re acclimated to it — even “low-light” plants! That’s because, compared to direct light outdoors, direct indoor light is considerably diffused by glass in windows and doors.
If you want to move your plants outdoors for the summer, you’ll need to ensure that you slowly acclimate your plants to brighter outdoor conditions. Even if you’re moving a plant from one side of the window to the other, acclimation is required!
While many plants can grow in direct light indoors, certain sun-loving plants require it, like most cacti and succulents.
Indirect Light
Compared to direct light, indirect light is a general term to describe natural light conditions in the home where sunbeams do not directly hit the plant’s leaves. This may be due to where the plant is located (e.g., several feet from a sunny window) or the orientation of the nearest window (e.g., a north-facing window).
While direct light can be hard to come by, indirect light can be found throughout the home. It’s usually divided into three categories: bright, medium, and low (more on that later).
Where to Find Indirect Light
In varying strengths, indirect light can be found in various places. For example, bright indirect light is often found within a couple of feet of a window, medium indirect light can be found several feet away from a bright window, and low indirect light can be found across the room from the nearest window. North-, east-, south-, and west-facing windows are all sources of indirect light.
Plants That Love Indirect Light
Except for houseplants that require direct light, most plants grow well in indirect light indoors. However, not all plants grow well in the same strength of indirect light. For example, almost all houseplants grow well in bright indirect light, but only a select few will grow well in low light.
Plantfluencer Michelle Opela (@she.wears.the.plants) says the bird of paradise loves bright, indirect light and snake plants grow well in low light. Determining the type of indirect light in your home will help you narrow down your plant picks!
Bright/High Light
You may hear “bright” or “high light” instead of direct or indirect light. This can get confusing, but these terms are usually used to describe bright indirect light — the strongest category of indirect light.
“Bright indirect light is either a spot a little farther back from a window — a couple of feet back, for example, or just to the side of a window where the plant casts a strong shadow but doesn’t have the sun streaming on it,” Hancock says.
He adds that if you want to get fancy and officially measure the light levels, that bright indirect light would be about 500 footcandles. If you’re unfamiliar with the term “footcandle,” you’re not alone. This more than 100-year-old measurement of illumination is commonly used in horticulture to measure light intensity and is described as the brightness of one candle at a distance of one foot away. It’s equal to one lumen per square foot.
Where to Find Bright/High Light
Large east-facing, west-facing, and south-facing windows will all provide bright, indirect light throughout the day. You may also find bright indirect light directly in front of a large, unobstructed north-facing window or door, but it’s less common.
Plants That Love Bright/High Light
If your home has plenty of bright indirect light, the good news is you can grow almost anything! Hancock says that almost all houseplants will thrive in this type of light, including those that tolerate lower light levels.
A few classic picks for bright indirect light include fiddle leaf figs, many philodendron varieties, and monsteras (popular varieties include deliciosa, Thai Constellation, and albo).
Medium Light
Medium indirect light, also known as just “medium light,” is less intense than bright indirect light but stronger than low light. In a medium-light location, a plant should have a soft shadow for much of the day. If your plant needs medium light, you can safely position it several feet away from a bright window (about halfway across the room). Again, if you’re one to measure light levels, it’s 200 to 400 footcandles, according to Hancock.
Where to Find Medium Light
Any room with a window or natural light source will provide medium light somewhere. The window’s orientation (e.g., north-facing versus south-facing) will determine how close your plant will need to be to the window to provide medium light.
For example, in rooms with bright south-facing windows that provide lots of natural light, you can place your plant toward the middle of the room. In contrast, a darker north-facing window may provide medium light about three feet away.
Plants That Love Medium Light
Medium light will be too dark for many tropical and sun-loving plants, but you still have many options. Pothos, calatheas, prayer plants, and peperomia grow very well in medium indirect light.
Low Light
Low light refers to the darkest areas of your home — spots where a plant receives the smallest amount of natural light available. Hancock considers low light anywhere where you can just barely read a book/magazine without having to turn on supplemental lighting. That would be 100 to 200 footcandles, if you’re measuring.
A common misconception about this type of light is that your home’s windowless rooms or pitch-black areas would still be considered “low light.” Let’s squash that right here; all plants need natural light to grow and photosynthesize. That windowless bathroom isn’t low light; it’s just dark, and you’ll need to add a grow light in there if you want any plant to survive longer than a few weeks.
Where to Find Low Light
Low light is usually found across the room from a window. Think: the back wall of your living room. However, this isn’t always the case. If you have a room with a tiny north-facing window that is also partially obstructed, you may find that most of the space is low light. Ultimately, it depends on the room!
Plants That Love Low Light
Your plant options become far more limited in low light, and it’s important to note that most plants prefer brighter conditions where possible. However, a few select plants can still grow well in low-light areas of the home. According to the pros, these include snake plants, ZZ plants, pothos varieties, fern varieties, and dracaena varieties, such as the lucky bamboo.
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