Growers of African violets became some of the first houseplant gardeners who adopted fluorescent light tubes as a way to coax blooms in winter.

By Ross Collins

The Accidental Gardener
On a winter’s evening walk with the dog I have sometimes noticed a bluish glow emanating from the odd basement window. The source could be hatching aliens, but gardeners know better. They are more likely simply a bank of lights encouraging plants to grow during our dark winter months.
In the old days we could be suspicious that it was an indoor marijuana farm, but nowadays such greenery has become fairly easily and legally obtained, at least in dried form for whatever may suit our needs. So more likely the lights are encouraging houseplants to keep the faith when the weather turns bleak and the outdoors turn to black-and-white.
Grow lights for hobby gardening gained popularity a long time ago. My mother wrote about them in 1972, with the declaration that “there is just no way to provide enough light in winter from the window,” at least for houseplants that prefer high light. At that time the only reasonable grow light was the fluorescent tube. Its use, Dorothy observed, began among fanciers of African violets. “While it is possible to bloom violets in the home in winter,” she wrote, “the amount and kind of bloom received under natural light compared with that of fluorescent light puts the naturally bloomed ones in poor second place.” Specialized lights soon were available, called wide-spectrum lights. One of the first Dorothy noticed was the Gro-Lux brand. It’s still available, along with other standard fluorescent tubes.
But the options have expanded to new shapes and alternate light-generation systems. LEDs can provide a wide spectrum of light at a lower cost. As for fixtures, the only style my mother knew was the hanging metal frame, usually painted white, either two or four feet long, and perfectly appropriate to illuminate a warehouse or machine shop. For a living room, not so charming.
But Dorothy was able to hide the basic look by buying a fairly elaborate plant stand, five shelves of lights built into decorative frames supported by turned wood spindles. It dished out illumination in the form of one cool white tube and one warm white tube per shelf (for balanced color temperature) as her plants basked on plastic trays of pebbles. A timer kept the lights on the recommended 14 to 16 hours a day. All that was required of the human hand was a watering can. Which my mother invariably neglected. She would admit she was not all that fond of houseplant season, but what’s a north-country gardener to do?
Today you can find a wide variety of reasonably attractive light stands and arrangements, although the ornate wood one my mother used does not seem to be among the collections at nurseries or Amazon. Crafters: there’s business to be made here. “While the shelves with 48-inch lights in a workhorse type of setup probably belong in a plant room, an unused room or the basement,” she observed, ”there are several decorative ones which go well in the living room and family room decor.”
How far should lights be from the plants? “Start out with the lamps about 20 inches above the plant table,” she suggested, “then adjust as you note the need.” Plants that don’t get enough light become spindly and yellow. Older leaves drop. Too close and plant foliage may bleach. So they say. One wonders in the darkness of our short winter days if, honestly, such a thing as too much light can be possible.
Many gardeners don’t bother with grow lights for houseplants but do set up lights to start seeds in early spring. At one time I had a basement set-up of five 48-inch grow lights attached to hooks and chains for easy adjustment, with a heated tape under trays to coax seedlings of annual flowers and vegetables. “Such seedlings require maximum light,” explained Dorothy, “and they will need to be brought up to a matter of inches from the tubes.” Benefit of growing garden plants from seeds, in addition to that cheery glow coming from our basement window, is a hefty savings over buying four-packs later at the nursery. We also can order as seeds unusual varieties hard to find at garden centers.
General principles for common houseplants. First, low-light varieties such as those classic office plants, pothos, philodendron, Chinese evergreen and snake plant (once called Sansevieria, but reclassified as a Dracaena in 2014; never was polite to call it mother-in-law’s tongue). These really don’t need to take up space under your grow lights—after all, they actually survive in low-light offices.
Common medium-light plants include begonia, spider plant, jade plant and Norfolk Island pine. That last one, sometimes displayed with tinsel as a miniature Christmas tree, usually stands three or four feet high and so is going to need one tall grow light. But do we really care what happens to this fussy thing after the holiday season?
Common high-light plants include orchids, kalanchoe (but needs shorter days to bloom) and, most obviously considering their natural environment, cacti. The thing with cacti, however, is that they actually don’t need such light in the winter. “In my experience, cacti do not grow any better under lights than in a window,” Dorothy observed. “Probably it’s because most of them rest in winter, and it’s better not to force them to grow then.” But if you typically grow cacti, as I do, you also know that it’s best not to force them to do anything. They can get prickly.
Editor’s note: Dorothy Collins wrote a weekly garden column for the Fargo-Moorhead community from 1957 until 2008. It began in the Moorhead Daily News and, after that newspaper closed a few months after she began working there, moved to the Fargo-Moorhead Forum. Her last column appeared just a few weeks before her death at age 92. Many of her columns were based on experiences and challenges of her extensive gardens in south Moorhead where she lived during the entire time she wrote. Dorothy was an accredited flower show judge who herself collected boxes of ribbons for her own entries at flower shows and fairs.
Her son Ross, who grew up in Moorhead but now lives in Fargo, is a professor of communication at North Dakota State University. But he also tries his best to keep up his flower beds and gardens in his south Fargo home in the Hawthorne neighborhood. He calls himself the accidental gardener, because while gardening was never really his hobby he did learn a lot as his mother dragged him from flower show to show and nursery to nursery as a kid. He also worked at Shotwell Floral for a short time, a job that pleased his mother because he could get a discount on plants. He has served as president of the FM Horticulture Society, a group his mother co-founded in 1977.