They’re Cool, They’re White: Fluorescent Lights Foster Growth

No matter how well you care for your houseplants indoors, lack of light could cause them to languish. Yet there are steps you can take short of cutting down those trees that block the sunlight or installing extra windows in your home.

How about artificial light?

Don’t merely slide a houseplant underneath a reading lamp, though, because the energy just a few feet away from, say, a 100-watt bulb is inconsequential. Instead, buy one or more fluorescent light fixtures. The tubes don’t get hot, so you can put plants within a few inches of them. That’s how close most need to be to benefit.

There’s no need for special fluorescent tubes, either. Regular “cool white” works fine. To beef up the spectral quality of the light for plants, if you want, you can modify the fixture to accommodate one 15-watt incandescent bulb for each 4-foot fluorescent tube.

To coddle your plants with more light (at considerably more cost), consider high-intensity discharge, or HID, bulbs. Mercury, metal halide and sodium are the three types of HID lamps. They’re also used for outdoor residential lighting and street lamps, so they may be available at local stores or at greenhouse-supply companies.

Sodium lamps are the best of the artificial lights, providing the whole spectrum needed by plants. These lights are justifiable if you want your vegetable friends to luxuriate rather than to merely survive the winter.

Be warned that, although plants might like the brilliance, you might not. Too much fluorescence and you’ll feel as if you’re in a department store. And mercury lamps are so intense that, by contrast, fluorescent lighting appears warm and cozy. On the other hand, a sodium lamp will bathe a room in an eerie, amber glow.

To protect your sanity, you could set it all up in an out-of-sight spot in a basement or closet.