Where your plants come from
Every plant on your shelf is an immigrant with a homeland - and knowing it is the single best care cheat there is: a plant from Mexican cliffs wants sun and neglect, one from a Bornean jungle floor wants shade and humidity. Click a region to see which of our 252 mapped plants call it home.
👆 Tap a marker, or browse the regions below. Map is stylized - botany, not cartography.
The quick numbers
- Europe & the Mediterranean leads your windowsill: 53 of our mapped plants (21%) grow wild there.
- Central & South America is second with 47 - a strong showing.
- Little Madagascar alone gave your shelf 5 classics - more per square mile than any continent.
- We mapped 252 of our 306 profiled plants; hybrids and plants with genuinely unclear wild origins are left out rather than guessed. Free to cite with a link.
🦜 Central & South America 47 plants
The rainforests and cloud forests of the New World tropics gave living rooms more plants than anywhere else - aroids, bromeliads, jungle cacti and the whole prayer-plant family.
⭐ Monstera climbs trees in Mexican and Central American rainforest; the tomato started as a weedy Andean berry; dahlias were an Aztec crop.
🌵 Mexico & Arid Americas 12 plants
Deserts and dry hillsides breed survivors: nearly every classic windowsill succulent with a Latin flair starts here.
⭐ Echeveria rosettes grow on Mexican cliffs; the ponytail palm stores its drought reserve in that swollen base; dahlia, zinnia and marigold are all Mexican natives.
🦬 North America 23 plants
The prairie is the world's perennial border: coneflowers, black-eyed Susans and bee balm fed pollinators long before they fed garden centers.
⭐ The Venus flytrap is wild ONLY within ~100 km of Wilmington, North Carolina; sunflowers and blueberries are true American originals.
🏛️ Europe & the Mediterranean 53 plants
Cottage-garden classics and nearly the whole herbal tea shelf grew wild around the Mediterranean first.
⭐ Lavender, rosemary, sage and thyme are all Mediterranean scrubland plants - which is exactly why they hate wet feet.
🏔️ Middle East & Central Asia 11 plants
Dry mountains and steppes - home of the bulbs that conquered the world and the toughest silver-leaved perennials.
⭐ Tulips are wild mountain flowers from Central Asia that made (and broke) Dutch fortunes; aloe vera comes from the Arabian Peninsula.
🦒 Africa 14 plants
From West African rainforest to the Ethiopian highlands: some of the most indestructible houseplants on Earth evolved here.
⭐ The snake plant is West African; the fiddle-leaf fig grows into a rainforest tree in Cameroon; every cup of coffee traces to wild Ethiopian shrubs.
🐘 Southern Africa 23 plants
The Cape is a plant kingdom of its own - succulent country, and the source of half the 'string of...' shelf.
⭐ Jade plants, string of pearls and bird of paradise are all South African; rooibos grows wild ONLY in one mountain region of the Western Cape.
🦎 Madagascar 5 plants
An island that did evolution its own way - and stocked the world's brightest kalanchoes and palms.
⭐ Kalanchoe, crown of thorns, the areca and majesty palms and the polka-dot plant are all Malagasy endemics.
🏮 East Asia 32 plants
China, Japan and Korea are the old masters' nursery: most of the classic flowering shrubs and the entire tea tradition.
⭐ Peonies were bred in Chinese imperial gardens for 1,500 years; hostas and Japanese maples come from Japanese forest edges; all true tea is one Chinese species.
🌴 South & Southeast Asia 26 plants
Monsoon jungles: the home turf of alocasias, hoyas, most orchids on your shelf and the spice-cabinet teas.
⭐ Phalaenopsis orchids grow on jungle trees from the Philippines to the Himalayan foothills; ginger and holy basil are ancient South Asian crops.
🦘 Australia & the Pacific 6 plants
Isolated islands grow one-of-a-kind survivors - including, surprisingly, the world's favourite trailing houseplant.
⭐ Pothos is native to Mo'orea in French Polynesia; the kentia palm exists wild only on tiny Lord Howe Island; the Norfolk Island pine names its own island.
Origin explains care: match your conditions to a plant's homeland with the light checker and watering scheduler, or decode what the Latin name says about where it grew up in the botanical Latin decoder. Sources: regional floras and the care profiles linked above - corrections welcome.