by Janette Peel

Created on: May 22, 2008

A few simple precautions and remedies ensure your house plants remain in the best condition.

In addition to benefiting from correct feeding and watering, house plants have specific needs for heat, lights and humidity. If kept in ideal conditions, they provide a long lasting display of healthy flowers and foliage. Plant needs vary, and basic care information is usually given on labels inserted into the pot. The following general guide to common plant problems is useful if your plants begin to look unhealthy.

The right temperature:

Temperature needs are seasonal and reflect a plant's natural growth cycle. Usually this means active growth during the spring and summer months and dormancy in the autumn and winter months. Provide warmth for most actively growing and flowering house plants, and cooler temperatures for dormant one. House plants, such as Italian bellflower, that lose their leaves when dormant need quite cool temperatures.

Provide cool but frost-free temperatures for winter flowering hardy or nearly hardy house plants such as azaleas, polyanthus, forced hyacinths and daffodils, to prevent premature withering of the blooms.

House plants are more liable to suffer from too much heat than too little particularly in houses with central heating during the winter. If in doubt, lower the temperature or move the plant to a cooler position.

Keep house plants well away from direct sources of heat such as radiators and central heating ducts.

Try to avoid wildly fluctuating temperatures, though a drop in night temperatures is often beneficial, especially in winter. Don't move house plants between rooms of very different temperatures.

House plants left on windowsills at night in cold weather can occasionally suffer from frost damage, especially if the plant is behind closed curtains that prevent any heat from reaching it.

Provide drought free ventilation, particularly in hot weather.

The right light:

Display cacti, succulents such as Aloe vera varieties and most plants with furry, gray or waxy leaves in plenty of direct sunlight all year round.

House plants need more light when in bud or flowering than when resting, so move them closer to a window, if necessary.

The thinner the leaf, the more you must protect the plant from direct sunlight. The delicate leafy fronds a maidenhair fern, for example, shrivel up when exposed to direct sunlight for long periods.

Provide plenty of light for colored leaved and variegated house plants. Prolonged exposure to direct sunlight scorches

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