"Medium indirect sunlight"? What?

It's been a long, stressful week. So this Thursday post to supporters of the newsletter is some musings about measuring light and communicating badly about it.

I'm a pretty terrible keeper of plants. For a couple of seasons I had a few tomato plants in the yard... until I couldn't keep up with the weeding. Inside the home we have a lot of dead plants, with the only survivors being a few famously super-hardy pothos vines and peace lilies. Almost all other plants wind up meeting either a dry or watery end.

I'd like to have a wider variation of plant life the house since I rarely leave in my remote-work life. But figuring out exactly WHAT to get that won't get murdered by either my watering misadventures or the dim light levels inside the home is a bit of a surprising challenge... in measuring things.

If you walk into a home center, or even just a any florist shop, you'll very often see little tags on various plants that try to explain what the plant needs to survive. Those little tags have a lot to express in minimal space, so they often have vague-sounding descriptions for how much light (low/medium/high, direct/indirect sunlight or shade), water (X times per week) the plant needs.

As a known murderer of plants, you can guess how well I've been interpreting those vague labels. Looking online for more details doesn't help all that much either because while you can find more detailed descriptions for what "medium indirect sunlight" means... it's still a moving target because the sun literally moves throughout the day.

Now, people who know how to take care of plants by observing how they react to various situations would be able to take such rough descriptions and make things work. After all, plants are living things and have a certain amount of adaptability to them. They're not just going to wither away if they get one too many photons.

But surely, some kind of researcher out there has characterized what plants need in more concrete terms. Then at least I'll be able to get an actual baseline in my head of what those descriptions mean so I can make sense the scales involved.