New White Paper on Lighting for Interior Landscaping

The most comprehensive lighting guide for sustaining plants inside buildings

When it comes to providing natural light indoors, what's good for plants proves beneficial for all of us.

New research suggests that live plants are the canaries of our modern workplace. "By ensuring the proper amount of natural light indoors to support plant life, it's possible to support a healthy and productive environment for people, too," said Shane Pliska, president of Planterra.

Pliska explores these concepts in depth in the newly-released Planterra Lighting Guide for Interior Landscape Design. It is the first and most comprehensive guide for lighting plants inside buildings, to date.

Shane Pliska, Planterra President

"I wanted to provide a resource for architects, designers and building owners to use for upcoming projects," he said. "It is focused on how to provide the proper light to sustain life plants inside buildings."

Through his work for Planterra, a leading provider of interior landscape, horticultural and design-build services across the United States, Pliska discovered that when people searched about lighting for indoor plants online, it was dominated by resources for growing marijuana. Marijuana has very different requirements than lighting needed for architectural settings. After encountering building managers who were misled by this process, and one who mistakenly purchased garish purple lighting suitable only for marijuana, Pliska sought to set the record straight.

In Planterra Lighting Guide for Interior Landscape Design, Pliska aimed to inform readers on lighting availability and placement, the impact of windows and the spectrum of sustainability. Experts agreed that the information will benefit many industries.

"The Planterra Lighting Guide is a wonderful resource for designing interior spaces for much needed daily interaction with nature," said JD Brown, program director of Biophilic Cities. "A growing body of science confirms that access to nature is critical for our health and wellbeing, improves cognition and productivity. This guide will help to design spaces that connect interior spaces to the outside world to deliver this needed interaction with nature and the resulting benefits."

The guide details how to incorporate natural or artificial light. Find out how to perfect the timing and duration when lighting a plantscape indoors. Learn which types of plants thrive indoors. Choose, with confidence, the optimum plants for your environment. And discover how plants foretell the health of our interior environment.

"Planterra's new white paper on lighting for interior landscaping is a welcome resource for those of us responsible for designing, installing, maintaining or managing interior landscapes and the buildings in which they are located," said Nelson Hammer, landscape architect and author of Interior Landscape Design.  "It will assist such professionals in determining how both artificial and natural sources of light will affect the locations where plants are proposed or exist, and how to create the best possible environment for them. Early coordination between the interior landscape designer and the building designer is rarely-if ever- achieved. If architects were provided with this white paper, it might help foster that early coordination."

Review the research in the newly-available guide, Planterra Lighting Guide for Interior Landscape Design, available at Planterra.com/light.