Flowering house plants: Less bother more blooms

Beautiful, elegant and surprisingly tough, this selection of indoor plants is high on impact but low on effort

- Sarah Gerrard-Jones

I don't describe plants as 'hard to kill' or 'easy care. It's not very helpful for a plant to be labelled 'easy' when you've already killed three of them - it only undermines your confidence. I can guarantee that any plant you have found 'hard to kill' can be found on someone else's compost heap.

Instead, I prefer to use the terms 'low maintenance', 'resilient' and 'reliable' to describe plants such as the peace lily that, planted in a self-watering pot, need nothing more than a weekly glance. Choosing a fuss-free plant like Anthurium andraeanum, which makes little demand on your time in return for a generous display of colour, will brighten your interior and build your plant-parenting prowess.

Peace lily 
Spathiphyllum wallisii

Whether it's outdoors or indoors, we gardeners want it all - a plant that grows well in almost any type of light situation, and we also want it to bloom. Step forward, Spathiphyllum wallisii, which fulfils these requirements perfectly. The light needed to keep this plant happy isn't excessive; a south-facing window in the height of summer would burn it to a crisp, but placing it near or on a windowsill facing in any other direction will cause no complaints.