In nature, plants cannot grow without sunlight. Although plants can survive for a short time without sunlight, they cannot grow without it. Plant cells need light for photosynthesis and to obtain the energy they need to grow. However, we can replace sunlight with artificial light.
Another rare exception is parasitic plants, which derive their energy from other living plants and therefore do not need light at all.
However, it is a little-known fact that if a plant is green, it needs sunlight or alternative artificial light to survive and grow. For the most part, we associate the light that plants need to survive with the sun, but this is not necessarily true.
If there’s one word that connects all non-plants to the rest of us, it’s photosynthesis. It is the magical process by which plants eat, and what makes it so magical is that plants are autotrophic. It is also a fancy word to show how they prepare their food from scratch before eating.
Plants take in carbon dioxide from the air, water from their roots and use light as fuel to produce glucose and sugar, plants also produce the oxygen we all love as a waste product. This is one of the key reasons why plants are not only important but vital to life itself, so we all breathe in plant waste, and this makes it even more interesting.
We also know that it is made up of different colours and that plants contain a molecule called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is responsible for absorbing light, more precisely, chlorophyll absorbs red and blue light and reflects green light back.
If a plant is not in direct sunlight, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t get any sunlight. Let’s imagine for a moment that we take the plant out of the window and put it in a dark corner of the room, we will still see the plant, which means photons will bounce around the room and hit your eyes, but they will also hit the plant and that’s why you can see them. Plants still use light, it’s not as abundant as direct sunlight, but it’s still a source of light.
Plants are really good at using any light source. The ability of plants to use light sources really depends on the type of plant and the demand for them, because as we know, there are thousands of plants in all corners of the world. Some plants grow in deserts or areas where direct sunlight lasts for 12 hours, so they are very dependent on as much direct sunlight as possible. But in the tall, dense rainforests, where almost no light reaches the ground, these plants have adapted to survive and reproduce in high humidity and low light.