Plants have needs & requirements that far outweigh our desire to put a certain plant in a certain place. You have to take into consideration the lighting of an area before you place a plant. Just because you or your interior decorator envision a seven-foot ficus benjamina majestically standing in that dark drafty corner of your living room, doesn’t mean it can happen. You can certainly decide whether you want a table plant, a short and bushy floor plant, a tall slender tree, or a huge specimen with a five foot canopy. What you can’t decide is to put a tree that needs bright light into a gloomy area; or to place a plant that needs to stay damp on a ledge near the ceiling where the heat congregates. If you want your plants to survive you have to play by their rules.

You can go on the Internet and find 100 sites listing plants that botanists have determined will do well in low, medium, and high light; & I’ll talk about these suggested plants in a later chapter. In the next few pages, my suggestions are going to be more anecdotal or as they say in medicine, evidence based, and perhaps not always scientifically defensible. But I have worked in the interior plant maintenance business for over thirty years; and I have seen what plant works where & what plant doesn’t. So here are some general observations that I hope will help you out.

(DON’T SKIP THE NEXT PARAGRAPH! I KNOW YOU ARE ONLY INTERESTED IN HAVING PRETTY PLANTS NOT LEARNING ABOUT BOTANY, BUT THE CONCEPT OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS IS IMPORTANT.)

Next Section: Photosynthesis