What light does that window actually give?
Every care guide tells you a plant wants bright indirect light. None of them tell you whether your window has any. Answer four questions and get the answer in the words the guides use — with the reasoning, so you can judge it yourself.
Check the answer against your own hand
On a bright day, hold your hand a foot above where the plant will stand and look at the shadow. A crisp shadow with hard edges is direct sun. A soft shadow you can still clearly make out is bright indirect — the thing most houseplants are asking for. A faint, blurry shadow is medium light, and if you cannot really see a shadow at all, you are in low light whatever the window promised. This costs nothing, works in any room, and beats any estimate including this one.
Distance does more than direction
Light from a window falls away fast — not just with distance, but because a plant set back into the room sees a smaller slice of sky through the opening. Two metres from a big south-facing window can be dimmer than a sill on the shaded side of the house. If a plant is struggling, moving it closer to the glass is nearly always a bigger change than moving it to a different window.
The hemisphere flip
In the northern hemisphere the sun tracks across the southern sky, so a south-facing window is the bright one and a north-facing window gets even, shadowless light all day. South of the equator it is exactly reversed: north-facing windows are the bright ones. East and west are unaffected — east gets gentle morning sun, west gets hot afternoon sun that can scorch leaves through glass in summer. Guides written in one hemisphere and read in the other are the reason for a lot of dead plants.
A sheer curtain is a tool, not a compromise
Direct sun through glass burns the leaves of most houseplants, and the standard fix is the cheapest one: hang something thin over the window. It converts harsh direct light into exactly the bright indirect light the labels ask for, which is why a sunny window with a net curtain suits more plants than the same window bare.
FAQ
Why not measure it with my phone?
Phone light sensors are not comparable between devices, sit behind the screen glass, and the browser API for them is unreliable. A reading that changes when you swap phones is worse than an honest estimate.
Does window size matter?
Yes, and it is not asked here because it interacts with everything else. A tall, wide window behaves like being one step closer to the glass; a small one like being a step further away. Adjust the answer accordingly.
What about winter?
Expect one band lower from late autumn to early spring, further from the equator more so. A plant that is happy on a medium-light shelf in July can want the sill in January.
Is anything sent anywhere?
No. It is a rules table that runs in this page.
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