The light requirement tier for every houseplant species in our care library, in one flat file. Free to use, free to republish with attribution, in CSV or JSON.
Our care library files each houseplant species into one of four light tiers, the same brackets interior growers have used for decades. This dataset releases that single column, joined to both names, so that anyone writing about plants, building a tool, or teaching a workshop can answer “which tier does this species sit in” without scraping care blogs one page at a time.
| Tier value | Lux, roughly | Reads as |
|---|---|---|
low | 270–800 | Survival light for tough species; a few metres from a window |
medium | 800–1,600 | The comfortable middle of a decently lit room |
high | 1,600–10,800 | Near a window, no midday sun on the leaves |
very_high | 10,800+ | Sun on the sill for part of the day |
Tiers are conventions, not measurements. The lux boundaries above are rounded conversions of the classic foot-candle brackets, and different references draw the lines in slightly different places, so treat a species near a boundary as belonging to both sides of it. The dataset also carries the light dimension only. Our library scores a growing spot on four dimensions together, light, temperature, humidity and airflow, and a tier match on light alone does not make a spot right. If you want the four-dimension answer for a specific spot, the free spot checker runs in the browser.
The dataset is published under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. Use it, reprint it, build on it, commercially or not. The one condition is attribution, and this line covers it:
scientific_name is unique per row and carries the cultivar where relevant. common_name repeats across cultivars and is not a key.light_requirement is always one of low, medium, high, very_high. No blanks, no other values.If a tier looks wrong for a species you know well, we want to hear it: [email protected]. Corrections land in the library first and flow into the next snapshot of this file.