The best herbs to grow in low light

Six herbs tolerate genuinely low light indoors: mint, lemon balm, parsley, chives, cilantro and chervil. Thyme and bay will survive it without producing much.

The honest framing matters here. None of these plants prefer shade. They tolerate it, which means slower growth, softer stems and smaller harvests than the same plant in a sunny window. What they will not do is die on you, which is more than can be said for rosemary or lavender in the same spot.

What counts as low light?

Most people asking this question do not actually know which category their window falls into, and the answer changes what you can grow.

Direct sun means the sun’s disc is visible from where the plant sits, for a measured number of hours. A south-facing window with nothing outside it gives six to eight hours.

Bright indirect means the sky is clearly visible but the sun is not, or a sheer curtain diffuses it. Most east and west windows, and south windows blocked by a building or tree.

Low light means an unobstructed north window, a spot several feet back from any window, or a room where you would need a lamp to read comfortably at midday.

A quick test: on a bright day, hold your hand a foot above the spot where the plant will go. A sharp, well-defined shadow means direct sun. A soft shadow with recognizable edges means bright indirect. A shadow you can barely make out means low light, and this is the page for you.

If it turns out you have more light than you thought, our indoor lighting guide covers what to do with it, and the easiest herbs to grow opens up considerably.

The six herbs that handle it

Mint

The most shade-tolerant herb on this list and the one to start with. Mint grows wild along shaded stream banks, so a north window is closer to its native conditions than a sunny sill.

Expect longer gaps between leaf pairs than a sunny-window plant, and pinch the tips regularly to keep it compact. Give it its own pot; it will strangle anything sharing the soil. Full guide: growing mint indoors.

Lemon balm

A mint relative with the same shade tolerance and none of the invasiveness. It handles a north window well and regrows readily from a hard cutback when it gets leggy.

It wilts dramatically when it dries out and recovers within an hour of watering, which in a low-light pot is a more useful signal than guessing.

Parsley

Parsley manages on a few hours of weak morning light. It will be slower to fill out and the leaves will be a deeper green, which is the plant adapting rather than a problem.

Give it depth. Parsley grows a taproot and needs at least 8 inches of pot regardless of the light. Full guide: growing parsley indoors.

Chives

Chives take partial shade better than most alliums and regrow after every cutting, so one pot lasts years. Cut the outermost leaves at the base rather than trimming the tops.

In low light they thin out faster than usual. A cold winter rest of six to eight weeks restores vigor. Full guide: growing chives indoors.

Cilantro

Cilantro is a cool-season plant, and a dim window is usually a cooler window. That makes low light an advantage rather than a handicap, because heat is what makes cilantro bolt.

It still bolts eventually. Sow a fresh pot every two to three weeks. Full guide: growing cilantro indoors, and why herbs bolt if yours keeps running to seed.

Chervil

The one genuinely shade-preferring herb here. Chervil bolts in direct sun and does its best work in a cool, dim spot, which makes a north window close to ideal.

Its seed needs light to germinate even though the plant wants shade, so surface-sow it. Full guide: growing chervil.

Two that will survive without thriving

Thyme and bay laurel will not die in low light, and neither will give you much. Thyme grows slowly and loses aromatic intensity; bay simply sits there, which for a slow evergreen shrub is close to normal. Grow them if you already have them. Do not buy them for a dark room.

What changes when the light is low

This is the part that decides whether the plants survive, and it is mostly about water.

Water considerably less often. Less light means less photosynthesis, less transpiration and less evaporation from the soil surface. A pot that needed water every three days in a sunny window may go ten days in a dim one. Test with a finger every time rather than keeping a schedule.

Use a faster-draining mix. More perlite, sand or vermiculite than you would use in full sun, so that the extra water has somewhere to go. Our growing media guide covers the ratios, and what perlite does explains why it helps.

Use shallower pots. A deep pot holds a reservoir of wet soil below the roots, and in low light that reservoir never dries. Shallow and wide beats deep and narrow here, except for taprooted plants like parsley and chervil that have no choice.

Keep air moving. Airflow does some of the drying that sunlight would otherwise do, and it suppresses the fungal problems that damp, still air encourages. Leave space between pots instead of grouping them, and run a fan in the room if the air is completely static.

Watch for root rot. It is the most common way low-light herbs die, and the early symptom is drooping leaves, which looks exactly like thirst. Wet soil plus a drooping plant means stop watering. Our root rot guide covers treatment.

Rotate the pots. Plants in weak light lean toward it hard. A quarter turn every few days keeps growth even.

Why these herbs cope and others don’t

Plants in chronic low light depend on how efficiently their leaves capture what little energy arrives.^[1] Shade-adapted plants change their leaf structure to compensate, and the differences are visible.

Their leaves are darker green, holding larger chloroplasts and more chlorophyll to capture light more efficiently. They are thinner, with fewer layers of columnar palisade cells and chloroplasts spread more evenly through the leaf rather than bunched.^[2] And they are larger, presenting more surface area to collect what light there is.^[1]

This is why a mint plant grown in a north window looks different from one grown in a south window: bigger, darker, floppier leaves on longer stems. It is the plant working correctly, not failing.

It also explains the limit. Mediterranean herbs like rosemary, thyme, sage and lavender evolved on open hillsides in intense sun and never developed these adaptations. Put them in a dark corner and they stretch, pale and rot rather than adapting.

The alternatives

If your light is genuinely poor and you want more than these six, you have two options.

Add a grow light. A modest full-spectrum LED converts a dark corner into a viable growing spot and removes the constraint entirely. Our lighting guide covers what to buy and how high to hang it.

Grow microgreens instead. Microgreens are harvested within two to three weeks, living mostly off the energy stored in the seed, so they need far less light than a mature plant. Our microgreens guide covers growing them from scratch, and a kit like the one from Hamama removes the setup entirely. Our Hamama review covers how well it works.

References

1. Ruban A. V. (2009). Plants in light. Communicative & Integrative Biology, 2(1), 50–55. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2649303/ ↩︎ ↩︎

2. Gotoh, E., Suetsugu, N., Higa, T., Matsushita, T., Tsukaya, H., & Wada, M. (2018). Palisade cell shape affects the light-induced chloroplast movements and leaf photosynthesis. Scientific Reports, 8(1), 1472. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-19896-9 ↩︎