My wife and I live in a box of a one bedroom apartment that receives very little direct sunlight. We love plants, and had great success with them in our last apartment that provided adequate sunlight for them, but we’ve failed miserably in our new place. My question is this, what kind of plants that are widely available could we buy that would survive in a low light environment? We do have windows,and get some sunlight into our apartment, but no where where they could receive it directly.
When in doubt, turn to ferns.
I have a spider plant that lives in a corner with low light. It also survives bright light, forgetting to water it, and moving house. I rather think that spider plants are very hardy, attractive plants to have around the house. (And they reproduce! imagine…little spider plant babies on stringers growing across your table)
–Arwen
In real ground, such as a flowerbed, my answer would be hosta. I’ve never tried it in pots, though. You get a mound of foliage and an annual show of flowers on tall stalks. In a flowerbed, they’re fodder for slugs. You won’t get those indoors.
Impatiens (also called Patient Lucy) would be a good bet, too.
Mushrooms
WIGGUM: I hear miniature palms do well in low-light conditions.
Reeder: I’m 99.9% certain you’re joking, so I will manfully resist the urge to say that mushrooms are not plants 
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- Tamerlane
Philadendrons do very well in low light - in fact, mine downright rebels if it gets ANY direct sunlight.
I’ll also second the spider plant vote - you have to WORK to kill on of these.
Also, butterfly plants do quite well in low-light situations. (Well, at least mine do)
Ivy seems to do alright but you didn’t say where you are so youll have to visit a local plant store & ask them what kinda plants you can use.
My aglaonemas (aka, inexplicably, Chinese evergreens) do well in low light, plus they’re very tolerant of lapses in watering. They’re totally easy to propagate, too. These features make them a popular houseplant, so they’re easy to find.
I also have a long-suffering spider plant that limped along in a windowless office for two years with just an incandescent gro-light, so I can attest to their hardiness. He now lives in a sunnier spot and is making babies like crazy. (Yes, he is a he. His name is Maurice, and you should see the looks I get when people overhear that Maurice is making babies in my office.)
I know nuthin about plants, but we have an aloe in a pot that got accidently shoved into a dim and damp corner of the house when we were moving. Absolutely no direct sunlight at any time of day. Months later, we wondered where it went, and found it. It was doing OK, but not exactly flourshing.
One houseplant that survives under the worst possible condtions - including very low light - is the aspidistra, or “cast iron plant.” Another possibility would be to get a full spectrum light over a shelf and grow plants under that.
The best plants for real low light conditions are plastic ones.
They come in a plethora of realistic forms, and after a while they become tattered and drop leaves just like the real ones.
[hijack]
Soooo, Tamerlane… Just what are mushrooms?
Hmmm, maybe they’re animals. That would explaing how they all run away when I go into the woods to find them.[/hijack]
“Mushrooms are fungi, and are usually placed in a Kingdom of their own apart from plants and animals.” Still, whether Reeder was kidding or not, you can grow several edible types of them as house plants, which I’ve almost decided upon due to my low light conditions. Here’s a few. These people also sell the Morel Habitat Kit for starting a patch of morels somewhere you don’t have to hunt for.
Bboy: Fungi, of course . A separate Kingdom from plants and probably, and only in the most general sense, slightly more closely related to animals than to plants.
The classic five Kingdoms ( frequently subdivided into many more, but we’ll stick with the classic five ) are:
Animalia ( animals )
Fungae ( fungi )
Plantae ( plants )
Protista ( protozoa )
Monera ( bacteria )
The Kingdom Fungae is, rather oddly, not defined by any specific unique characters, but rather by a suite of characters that are unique only when taken in toto. I’ll go into details if you like.
They tend to get lumped in with plants because of historical reasons ( in some superficial ways they seem plant-like, for example in terms of vegetative growth ). So most modern Mycologists are trained in, and in universities work in, Botany departments. But really, plants and mushrooms are about as unrelated as cows and daffodils.
- Tamerlane
I think begonias (the dark-leaved types with leaves which are red underneath) should do OK in low light - they originate of the forest floor,
Dijon Warlock: I’ve done a couple of those kits - Great fun . Well, okay - Modest fun, but still fun 
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- Tamerlane
I guess it depends on what particular type of mushroom you choose to cultivate…"But Officer, they’re houseplants! I gots me low light!
All (or most) kidding aside, how well do they produce? Well enough to be cheaper than buying the 'shrooms in the supermarket at $Umpteen a pound?
The mushrooms that you can grow in home kits (like to ones you can go out and pick for free, if you know what you’re doing) generally have much finer flavour than shop-bought mushrooms, mostly due to freshness.
I’ve grown golden pathos and peace lillies in a windowless office under regular flourescent lighting.