Plants that trail from a shelf

A trailing plant is chosen for the one direction it grows, which is down. Its stems have no wish to stand, so they hang over the edge of a shelf or a bracket, and the plant makes length where an upright plant would make height. That changes what you are buying. The size on an entry for a trailing plant is a length, not a height, and a plant that sits neatly on a shelf in its first year can reach the floor by its third.

The shelf is the harder part of the arrangement. Shelves go where the wall is, not where the light is, and light falls away with distance from a window far faster than it feels as though it should. A pot on a shelf two metres inside the room is in a different place from the same pot on the sill, and the gap between one metre from the glass and three is bigger than the gap between an east window and a west one. The guide to light, room by room shows how to measure it with nothing but your hand and a sheet of paper.

The mistake that kills them

Watering a pot you cannot see into. A shelf puts the compost above eye level, so its surface is never looked at, and the plant gets a drink on the same day every week out of habit. That is how a trailing plant rots. The compost stays wet, the roots sit in it, and yellow lower leaves are usually the first sign that the plant is being watered too often.

Take the pot down on the day the log offers, push a finger into the compost to the first knuckle, and lift the pot to feel its weight. The guide to telling whether a plant needs water sets out both tests. If the answer is yes, water until it runs from the bottom, let it drain, and put it back.

The second mistake is slower. A trailing stem in poor light grows long and bare, with small pale leaves spaced far apart, and a variegated plant goes plain green. That is the plant reaching for light, and it is not a disease. Moving the plant nearer the glass stops the stretching but does not refill the stems that are already bare. Cut them back to a leaf and root the cuttings in water, which suits almost everything that trails, as the guide to propagating from cuttings explains. Then push the rooted pieces back into the same pot, so that it fills out from the top.

How the list was chosen

An entry is listed here when its habit is recorded as trailing, and only once the entry has been reviewed. The list is sorted with the easiest plants first and then by name, so the ones at the top are those that forgive the most. Some of these plants climb as readily as they trail, and a few will live outdoors as well as in; each entry says which, and gives the light the plant wants.

Choose by the light on your own shelf before you choose by the leaf. A plant that wants bright indirect light will not make long, full stems on a shelf at the back of a room, however well it is watered, and a plant that tolerates medium light will. Turn the pot a quarter turn each week so the stems hang evenly instead of all falling toward the window.