LED lights for houseplants

HOUSEPLANTS can bring a dull room to life.

As well as adding colour, their varieties of form easily give a lift to the most lifeless of homes – especially useful, at times, for modern city living.

But not all the new spaces we add to our homes have large windows. Basements, garage conversions, loft extensions and box bedrooms – all can be left devoid of natural light.

And plants need light as their energy source, using sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates for fuel.

With too little light, a plant slowly diminishes and will eventually die.

Yet research has shown time and again that having houseplants in our homes brings important benefits to our mental and physical health.

They clean toxins from the air, increase oxygen levels, lift our mood and even help us to recover faster from stress and illness.

So putting plants into lightless spaces can help bring those spaces to life, and ourselves as well.

The problem is you need to be sure to choose the right plant as some have a much higher tolerance for shade – I give some of my favourites below. But you can also widen your options for dark spaces by a careful choice of lighting. Standard light bulbs do not replace sunlight – but fluorescent and LED bulbs can provide the right wavelengths for your plants’ needs.

For fluorescent lights, you will want a “cool white” tone, as white light contains all the wavelengths required.

LED lights are highly customisable – you’re best with special horticultural ones. The right ones will seriously increase the range of suitable plants.

Of course, some people will go for artificial plants. But I’ve always felt that artificial plants indoors bring you down rather than uplift you. You can spot a fake plant very quickly.

Phototropic growth is the growth all plants make towards light – if you put a plant on a windowsill you’ll see all the foliage twist towards the light.

Artificial plants don’t do this, obviously, and their leaves often face all over the place, which is one of the reasons they look artificial.

One thing to remember with live plants is that it’s critical you keep all leaves clean of dust to ensure they get maximum light. You can use special foliage wipes, or kitchen roll dipped in water with a squeeze of lemon, or watered-down milk. So there’s no need to give up on your dark spaces – growing plants is certainly possible.

For the best effect, you’ll want to go for variety: small plants for window sills or bookshelves, trailing plants coming from a hanging basket, perhaps, while large uprights – such as philodendrons trained up poles, dracaena marginata or parlour palms – work beautifully in the corners.

As a general rule, plants with darker green foliage are able to survive better in shade than those with a lighter foliage.

This is because the darker green comes from extra chlorophyll B – showing that the plant has adapted to capture more lowintensity light, allowing it to survive in shadier places.

Usually they are plants used to living on forest and jungle floors, where tree canopies steal most of the sunlight.