What "Bright Indirect Light" Actually Means (Or: How I Ended Up With a Grow Light Bolted to My Ceiling)
- Lynn Adkison
- Mar 30
- 4 min read
Updated: Mar 31
I have never fully understood what "bright indirect light" means.
I'm not sure I understand it now, if we're being completely honest. It's the least well-defined term in the entire plant world — a phrase that appears in approximately 100% of tropical plant care guides and explains precisely nothing about what you're actually supposed to do in your house in Northeast Georgia.
So I guessed.
My guess was built on a single premise: these plants are native to the tropics. Their definition of "light" is fundamentally different from what I've got here. Whatever they're used to, I don't have it naturally. Ergo, we supplement.
What followed was not a carefully researched lighting plan. It was a series of increasingly committed solutions to problems I didn't know I had until the plants told me — usually by drooping, scorching, or just looking deeply unimpressed.
The Octopus Problem - Tripod Grow Lights
When everything moved into the spare room, I finally had the space to be strategic. My first thought was: oooo! I have two Sansi grow light tripods — each with four bulbs on individual bendy arms — if I put them in the center of the room, I'll have LOTS of light. Eight arms, all pointed outward like tentacles. A grow light octopus, if you will. Everything in the room would get something pointed in its direction.
It was a genuinely good idea, right up until I tried to actually do something in the room.
Turns out two tripods in the middle of a 1,000-square-foot space that is otherwise completely lined with shelving, tables, and a desk are directly in the middle of the way. Every time. Always.
When I tried moving them out of the center, they ended up too close to the plants, and too close to the plants meant scorched leaves. So the floor wasn't going to work.
I called in reinforcements. My SO — not a plant person, not a light person, but both handy and a good problem solver — got handed an idea and a project. He took himself to the hardware store after figuring out how the top of one tripod attached, and after an afternoon of the two of us staring at the ceiling and trying not to drop bolts, we ended up with a Frankenstein half-octopus hanging from where the bedroom light used to be.
The other half stayed on its tripod in the corner, where it now ensures the top shelves have coverage and the Florida Bronze, the giant Bird of Paradise, and the other tall things that don't fit anywhere else are getting what they need.
Half octopus on the ceiling. Half octopus in the corner. Problem (sorta) solved.
Plant Shelf Lighting
Here's the thing about plant shelves that come with grow lights: those lights are not great.
I still use them — both shelving units, both sets of built-in lights — so I suppose I shouldn't throw shade. But if we're being real, they're mostly good for keeping tropical things from dying. They're not doing much for making tropical things grow. There's a difference, and anyone with eyes notices literally as quickly as they put in REAL grow lights.
File that under: things I wish someone had told me before I assembled two of them.
Lighting the Nook
In the corner of the spare room, there's a nook. The kind of architectural decision that made sense to someone at some point — a chest-of-drawers sized gap where the closet doesn't reach. There's been a dresser there since someone actually lived in the room. I repurposed that into storage, put a small plant stand on top of it, and called it a day.
The plant stand has those shelf lights. Just those.
I let it sit like that for a while — whole days — before I started noticing the drooping. The nook gets no ceiling light. The half-octopus doesn't reach it. The shelf lights were not pulling their weight.
What kind of plant person would I be if I let the plants droop?
I needed a light source I could mount without actually mounting anything — no drilling, no permanent ceiling damage, just something that would work in a nook that was never designed to need a light. What I came up with was a plug-in drop light, a Command-strip clothes hanger, and some adhesive wire holders to run the cord cleanly down the wall.
All of that stuff was at Home Depot. And because the plants were drooping right now, I went to Home Depot right then — which is how I ended up paying $40 for a grow bulb I absolutely knew I could source cheaper if I'd just waited two days for shipping.
I did not wait.
The nook is currently home to two Joepii, a Painted Lady, a Dieffenbachia, a Birkin, the bottom cutting of the BMF, a collection of succulents I genuinely don't know what to do with, and a Fittonia.
The Fittonia — the one with the red veins you see absolutely everywhere — nearly didn't make it through last fall. It's making a comeback now, slowly, because my SO likes the red-veined ones better than the green plants and we are all trying for one another in this relationship. That's how it works.
Bonus Windows Facing East
There are two windows in the spare room that face almost due east. On sunny mornings, I open those too — not just for the light, which is real and welcome, but for the heat.
East windows and basic greenhouse effect mean the spare room runs 5 to 10 degrees warmer than anywhere else in the house year-round. That's not an accident I'm working around. That's a feature.
"Bright indirect light" still doesn't mean anything to me as a definition. But a ceiling-mounted half-octopus, a tripod corner situation, some mediocre shelf lights, a $40 panic purchase held up by Command strips, and two east-facing windows in the morning?
That, I understand.
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*Questions about the Sansi lights, the nook MacGyver situation, or what I'm eventually going to do with those succulents?
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