Five spots at home where a real plant does not survive.

2. The bathroom

On paper the bathroom is ideal: warm and humid. In practice it goes wrong on light. A bathroom window is small and often frosted, and many bathrooms have no window at all. The humidity also swings enormously, from bone dry to a hundred per cent and back.

What you are left with is a plant slowly wasting away, with no clear moment at which things went wrong. See also our selection for the bathroom.

3. Above the radiator

The windowsill above a radiator is the most used plant spot in the Netherlands and the worst. From October to April a constant stream of dry, warm air rises past the pot. The root ball dries out faster than you can top it up, and the leaf edges turn brown.

You can compensate by watering more often, but then you swing to too wet as soon as the heating is off for a few days. It is a spot where you can only lose.

4. The south-facing windowsill

Exactly the opposite problem. Behind glass facing south, the temperature climbs well above thirty degrees on a sunny afternoon, and the light is bright enough to scorch leaves. It happens fast: one afternoon is enough for pale patches that never go away.

The plants that can take it are cacti and succulents, and those by no means suit every interior.

5. The bedroom

Bedrooms are heated less, often have the curtains closed and therefore get the least light of all the rooms where you spend a lot of time. For a plant that is six months on rations.

Yet that is exactly where you want calm and greenery. A large plant beside the bed does precisely that, without you having to move it to keep it alive. For that size, look at the large artificial plants.

What these five places have in common

It is almost never about care and almost always about light and temperature. Those are two things you cannot change without building work. You can choose a plant that asks less, or a plant that asks nothing at all.