Guides · Plants · 13 min read · Updated September 2026

Plants

The tradition’s living element, and where it goes. Which corners a plant should stand in and which it should not; the trees the old manuals placed around a house; what the manuals say about leaves; the plants the shops sell as luck and the three the classical eye admired; how much light a plant actually needs in the corner it is put in; and what the research says about air, attention and the view.

Oriented SE 123°

Wood

Fig. 01 Looking up a trunk into leaves. A plant is the tradition’s Wood in its living form, and the only element that can die on you.

Of the five elements, four are materials and one is alive. A plant is Wood as the tradition first knew it, growing, and it is the one thing in a room that carries sheng qi, the generative kind, by definition rather than by analogy. That is why the manuals reach for a plant before any other remedy, and why they are careful about where it stands: a living thing in the wrong place is in the way, and a dead one is the worst object the tradition knows. This page gives the places, the leaves, the trees outside, the plants the shops sell and the ones the scholars kept, the light a plant needs where the tradition puts it, and what the research does and does not find.

Where a plant goes

Plan 01 Where plants go: the dark corner, beside the seat, in front of the edge, and out of the door’s line Solid plants, each with a red centre, stand where the tradition wants them: in the corner daylight does not reach, beside the main seat, in front of the chimney breast’s edge so that it no longer points at the sofa, and at the far corner of the room. Ghosted plants stand where it does not: in the line of the door, where they are in the way of everything that enters, and beside the bed, where the manuals prefer nothing living and the sleeper prefers nothing to knock over.

The places the manuals name against are fewer. Not in the door’s line, where a plant is in the way of everything that enters and, in the tradition’s terms, blocks the mouth of qi; the same rule that keeps a tree off the axis of the front door outside. Not so many that the floor disappears, which is the clutter rule in another form. And, in most of the manuals, not beside the bed.

The trees outside

Before the manuals had houseplants they had trees, and the rules for them are the older layer. A tree directly in front of the door is refused in every yang-house text, as a post in the mouth of the house and, in the everyday reading, as a thing that hides the door and drops on the step. Trees behind the house are the tortoise made of wood, and welcome; trees at the flanks, taller on the dragon side, are the arms. A single large tree very close to a wall is read as pressing on the house, and the surveyor reads it as roots under the foundation. Willows belong by water and not by the door; the flowering trees, plum, peach, pomegranate, go where they can be seen from the rooms, which is the tradition’s way of saying that a garden is for looking at from inside. The outside page draws the site with its planting, and the front door guide the approach.

Leaves and shapes

Fig. 02 Four plants the manuals sort by shape, drawn beside a chair. A: broad, rounded leaves, the generous form of Wood, which may stand anywhere and beside the seat. B: spiked and pointed leaves, read as small sha; they belong at a window or a boundary, where a guard is wanted, and the ghosted one beside the chair is the one the manuals move. C: a trailing plant, read as sinking, kept off the entrance and from over a seat; solid on a shelf away from the chair, ghosted where it hangs over it. D: dried stems, which the tradition reads as dead and sends out. The sorting is the manuals’, not the botanist’s. What it comes to is a rule about points and lines near a body at rest: nothing sharp at eye level beside a seat, nothing hanging over a head, and nothing in the room that is not alive.

The four plants in the drawing are the manuals’ four kinds, and the rule under them is one rule. A round-leaved plant may stand anywhere, beside the seat included. A spiked one stands at a window or a boundary, where a guard is wanted, and not at the elbow of a chair. A trailing one hangs from a shelf on a wall nobody sits under, and not in the entrance, where the tradition wants things lifted. Dried stems are not a plant, in the tradition’s reading, and leave. The pattern is the one the beams and corners guide gives for furniture: nothing sharp or hanging over a body at rest.

The plants the shops sell, and the three the scholars kept

The plants sold as feng shui are a modern list. The money plant, in its two versions, the jade plant with its coin-shaped leaves and the Pachira with its braided trunk, is a twentieth-century commercial success, its name the whole of its claim. Lucky bamboo is not bamboo but a Dracaena, sold in the 1990s with a count of stalks for each wish, and it belongs to the popular tradition and to nobody older. Both are perfectly good plants; the jade plant lives on neglect and the Dracaena on tap water, which is why the shops chose them. What they bring is a plant, and a plant is what the tradition wanted in the corner anyway.

Fig. 03 The plants the classical house kept, which are the ones the treatises name and none of the ones the shops sell. The three friends of winter come first: the pine, which stays green through the cold and was read as constancy; the bamboo, hollow, jointed and unbroken by snow, read as uprightness; and the plum, which flowers on bare wood in the cold, read as endurance. Then the scholar’s two flowers, the orchid, which the Confucian tradition made the gentleman’s emblem for its scent without display, and the chrysanthemum, the autumn flower of Tao Yuanming, who picked it by the east fence and stood for the retired official ever after. And the lotus, clean out of the mud, kept in a glazed jar in the courtyard. Wen Zhenheng’s treatise of the 1620s, which Clunas reads for the taste of the Ming gentleman, gives them chapter by chapter and where each belongs: the pine and the plum outside and old, the bamboo where its shadow falls on the window paper, the orchid on the desk in a plain pot, the chrysanthemum in rows with the pots hidden, the lotus in the sun. None of them is a cure. They were kept for the eye and for what they said about the keeper. Wen Zhenheng, Zhang wu zhi, c. 1620–1627, in Clunas 1991; the readings are the literary ones every schoolchild learned. The glyphs are the site’s and not botanical drawings.

The drawing gives the six with what each was read as and where the treatise puts it, and the placings are a small feng shui of their own, older than the shops’. The pine and the plum stand outside and old, seen from the desk, because a tree is read across a distance; the bamboo stands where its shadow falls on the window paper, which is the one plant the tradition kept for its shadow; the orchid stands on the desk in a plain pot and is changed when it fades, since a scholar was judged by his pots; the chrysanthemums stand in rows by the east fence with the pots hidden, after Tao Yuanming, who picked them there and stood for the retired official ever after; the lotus stands in a glazed jar in the sun. A reader who wants a plant with a lineage has these six, and each is a plant a garden centre sells under its own name.

Bedrooms

Most manuals keep plants out of the bedroom, or allow one small one. The tradition’s reason is the pair: a plant is growth and movement, yang, and a bedroom is meant to be yin. The popular reason is different and wrong.

The light a plant needs

The tradition’s favourite place for a plant, the corner the daylight never reaches, is the place a plant is least able to live. A room’s light falls off fast from the window: a few thousand lux at the glass on a bright day, a few hundred two or three metres in, and tens in the far corner. Most houseplants want several hundred lux for most of the day to do more than survive; the ones that tolerate the corner, the aspidistra, the pothos, the peace lily, the snake plant, are the ones that grew on forest floors, and even they thin and lean in the dark. The manuals’ rule that the dark corner have a plant therefore comes with the designer’s rider: a lamp as well, which the tradition wanted there anyway, or a plant that can be swapped with one from the window every few weeks, or a plant chosen for the shade. A plant that dies in the corner has not cured it.

What the research says

Care as the rule

The tradition’s only absolute rule about plants is that they be alive. A dead plant in a room is, in the manuals, worse than no plant: Wood that has become its own opposite, in a place the tradition chose for growth. The practical form of the rule is that the number of plants in a house should be the number the household can keep alive, that the corner with no light should have a plant that lives without it or a lamp as well, and that the pot should be the right size for the plant and the saucer for the pot, since a plant standing in water is the tradition’s stagnant water and the florist’s root rot at once.

Checklist

In the dark corner, beside the seat, in front of the edge, at the sides of the door
Not in the door’s line, and not so many that the floor disappears
Outside: nothing directly before the door; trees behind and at the flanks, taller on the dragon side
Rounded leaves near people; spiked ones at the boundary if at all
Bedroom: none or one, for the yin, not the oxygen
Enough light, or a lamp, or a plant that can stand the shade
No dead or dried plants; silk only if you can defend it
As many as can be kept alive, and no more