Five Indoor Plants for Shady Rooms (Guest Post)

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In our old house we were able to grow a number of plants which thrived in the lighting conditions; I had countless orchids which bloomed continuously and my peace lily was constantly a mass of elegant white flowers. We've been in our home now for ten years and I haven't had a single blossom from either peace lily in that time, and the orchids went in the bin after the first year.

The problem is that our rooms are just too dark for them. In this post, a number of different plant options are provided for those like me who can't get their foliage to behave!

Indoor gardening has a number of benefits, from improving the aesthetics of a space with colourful blooms and verdant foliage to naturally purifying the air by taking in carbon dioxide and emitting fresh oxygen. Light is one of the single most important factors in the growth and development of a plant, but luckily, plants represent an extremely broad range of diverse organisms and there is a houseplant that does well in practically any environment imaginable.

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Get Digging!

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I love my garden, seriously love it. When we moved in it was a 70ft x 35ft suburban, ex-council rectangle of:

  • antiquated buxus hedges
  • a dangerous greenhouse
  • a random brick base for, I suspect, a long-gone shed
  • a concrete path leading to <shudder> a concrete washing line

and that was basically it. Oh, and a hell of a lot of broken glass. Six and a half years later and we're still picking bits out of the flowerbeds. First thing to go, before we'd even done anything to the house, was the path and washing line. I blogged about the transformation back in May 2011, linking it up to The Gallery.

I drew a plan, to scale, and laminated it.

Hubby dug, I directed. I weeded, he moved stuff. We had some fabulous barbecues and parties in the garden, I grew copious amounts of vegetables, I lost copious amounts of brassicas due to a vengeful cabbage white butterfly. Everything  panned out almost as I wanted it to.

One area that has been neglected significantly is the vegetable patch and herb garden. Over the last year, I've had to remove half the railway sleeper defined vegetable patches to create more play space for The Boy. I had another go this year at growing vegetables, confident in my previous success, but my seedlings died when I went away on holiday. The herb garden was going great guns, until the fence against it was blown down in a gale, and it crushed the rosemary bush, thyme plant and the coriander. When my dad replaced the fence panel, he put pay to the remaining rosemary bush, so that all that is there at present is an overgrown lavender bush.

I'm not painting a good picture am I?

For a keen gardener it's quite distressing.

Therefore when Bosch contacted me and asked me if I'd like to take part in a competition to transform part or all of my garden, I jumped at the chance. During the two months that I have to complete the challenge I will receive support from Bosch Lawn and Garden, GreenThumb lawn care, and Best4Plants in the form of garden equipment, lawn treatments and plants for the areas I'm making-over.

There are eleven of us 'competing' for the prize of a day with leading gardening expert Helen Yemm and two tickets to RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2012.

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