Small plants for a desk

A desk is a small, specific place. It is usually a metre or two from a window, at a height where the plant is looked at every day, and for part of every week nobody is there at all. Medium light fits that. It means a decent amount of daylight without a direct view of much sky, which is what a spot two or three metres into a room from a bright window gets, or one right beside a small window. The plants on this page are recorded at 40cm or less, so they stand on a desk without taking it over.

Most of them are ferns, a rex begonia or members of the prayer plant family. The entries say the same thing about all of them. Direct sun bleaches the markings, browns the edges or crisps the whole plant, so the sill that suits a succulent is the wrong place, and a desk set back from the glass is the right one. The guide to light, room by room shows how to measure what your desk gets with nothing but your hand and a sheet of paper.

The mistake that kills them

Letting the compost dry out, even once. These plants are less forgiving of drying than of anything else. The entry for the maidenhair fern says never let it dry out, not once, and the others ask for compost that stays lightly moist and is never quite dry. A desk makes it easy to forget the pot, so choose one day, push a finger into the compost to the first knuckle, and water by the finger, not the calendar. The guide to telling whether a plant needs water sets out the finger test and the weight test.

The second mistake is the air. Almost every plant here is recorded as wanting high humidity, and an office or a heated room is dry, because air conditioning dries a room out as thoroughly as a heater does. Keep these plants away from vents and radiators, and where the entry says to, water with rainwater or filtered water, because hard tap water browns the leaf edges of the prayer plants. The entries say how each one copes, and none of them is a plant for the shelf above a radiator.

A third, smaller mistake is moving a plant to the window to improve it. The light that was right at the desk will bleach a leaf at the glass, and the mark does not fade.

How the list was chosen

An entry is listed here when its recorded height is 40cm or less, when it is rated for medium light, when it can live indoors, and once it has been reviewed. The list is sorted with the easiest first, then by name. The plants that are rated for low light are gathered on the low light shelf, and the finder can narrow this selection further by pet safety, since not every plant here is safe for cats and dogs.

Check the entry for the pet line before a plant goes on a desk that an animal can reach, and turn the pot a quarter turn each week so the plant grows evenly instead of leaning toward the window.