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 244 mapped plants call it home.
👆 Tap a marker, or browse the regions below. Map is stylized - botany, not cartography.
The quick numbers
- Central & South America leads your windowsill: 35 of the 108 houseplants on the map (32%) grow wild there.
- Counting garden plants and tea herbs too, Europe & the Mediterranean is the biggest region on the map: 53 plants - 27 garden plants, 23 tea herbs and 3 houseplants.
- Little Madagascar alone gave your shelf 5 classics - more per square mile than any continent.
- We mapped 244 plants from our library of 724 profiles; hybrids and cultivars are filed under the home of their wild parents, and mushrooms and plants whose profile cannot name one home are left out rather than guessed. Free to cite with a link.
🦜 Central & South America 45 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's wild ancestors come from western South America; the Christmas cactus is a Brazilian rainforest epiphyte, not a desert plant.
🌵 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 22 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 grows wild only in a tiny region of boggy pine savannas in North and South 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 8 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 is believed to come 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; arabica coffee traces back to wild shrubs in the highland forests of Ethiopia.
🐘 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 30 plants
China, Japan and Korea are the old masters' nursery: most of the classic flowering shrubs and the entire tea tradition.
⭐ Peonies have been grown and revered in China for over a thousand years; hostas and Japanese maples come from the cool, moist woodlands of Japan, Korea and China; every true tea is one species, Camellia sinensis, from the hills of southwest China and northern Myanmar.
🌴 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 is named after the one island it comes from.
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. Every plant is filed under the home its own care profile names, linked above - corrections welcome.