Here’s the fact that reorganizes how you place plants: light doesn’t fade gently as you walk away from a window. It falls off a cliff. The difference between a great spot and a dead one is often a single meter — and your eyes will never tell you where the edge is.
The drop-off, in one line
In one measured living room, a spot a meter from the window still held most of the window’s light; two to three meters back kept under a fifth of it; the middle of the room, only a few percent. A meter is a small move; a few meters is a cliff. The full six-spot measurement lays out every reading — it runs from the window all the way down to a thousandth of the light in the corner.
A rule of thumb that works
You won’t carry lux numbers around, so use this: if the plant’s pot can “see” a decent chunk of the window or sky, the spot is probably workable. If the window isn’t really visible from where the pot sits, the spot is probably too dark. It’s rough, and it’s right far more often than eyeballing brightness.
Distance is the lever you control
You can’t add windows, but you can move a plant a meter. That single move can multiply its light several times over — a bigger intervention than any fertilizer or fuss. When a plant is struggling, “closer to the glass” is usually the fix.
