Timelapse Videos Show How Much Our Houseplants Move in a Day

Houseplants maybe don’t get the love they deserve. From filtering our air to lowering our blood pressure, there are a host of reasons why houseplants are a great part of a beautiful home.

But maybe you think they just sit still all day? Not so. Plants track the light across a room and follow a daily rhythm of their own, lifting their leaves in the morning and lowering them at night, a movement botanists call nyctinasty. Speed it up with a camera and a houseplant looks less like furniture and more like a slow animal. Thanks to some handy time-lapse video, we see that houseplants are actually quite active, stretching, bending, twirling and moving throughout the day.

And while they may not move fast enough for us to see with the naked eye, it’s nice to know they’re getting their daily movement in as well. Check out the active plants below.

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The effect is easiest to see in plants with big, jointed leaves. Prayer plants and calatheas fold up at dusk like closing hands, oxalis does the same, and even a common monstera or pothos will swing its leaves toward the brightest window over a few hours. If the videos have you looking at your own plants differently, our ten houseplants for people who kill houseplants is a good place to start, and this tiny house brimming with plants shows what happens when you let them take over. The concert for 2,292 plants in Barcelona takes the idea that plants have an inner life to its logical conclusion.

Edited by Ben VanderVeen · About Moss & Fog

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