Spring is when the dead plants turn up. The house is opened after the winter, the shutters go up, and the kentia palm that looked so good in the photos for the rental listing is standing in its pot, brown to the tips, exactly where it was left in October. Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody was there to do anything at all.
Decorative plants and flowers work in an Algarve house when they are chosen for the way that house is actually lived in. Where someone is home all year, that means tough, slow real plants in the right light. Where the house sits empty for months, it means good artificial ones, or simply fewer plants. Either way, the pot and the place matter about as much as the plant.
For houses with someone in them
The usual mistake is light, and it’s the opposite of the one people make further north: a south-facing window here can be too much. Behind glass in August plenty of leafy plants scorch, so a metre or two back from the window, or an east-facing sill, often suits them better than the brightest spot in the room.
The plants that cope best with real life are the unglamorous ones. Snake plants and ZZ plants put up with low light and a forgotten fortnight. A kentia palm is happy enough in the corner of a living room as long as somebody remembers it now and then, whereas a bird of paradise wants more sun and pays you back for it. Olive trees look wonderful in a pot indoors for about a month, and then they want to go outside, which is where they belong.
Water less in winter. Most houseplants that die here die of kindness, standing in a saucer of water through January.
For houses that are shut half the year
In a holiday home or a rental, a real plant is a promise somebody has to keep while you’re away, and usually nobody can. Good artificial plants are the honest answer there, and they have improved enormously; the cheap ones give themselves away with a plastic sheen and, in Algarve sun, colour that fades within a season. Dust them, too, because a dusty artificial plant looks more artificial than anything else about it.
Dried branches and grasses in a big vase are the calmer alternative. More on what survives guests and empty winters is in our piece on furnishing a holiday rental.
Cut flowers are the one thing in this article meant to be temporary. They last noticeably less in a hot August than in March, and less again beside the fruit bowl (ripening fruit gives off a gas that hurries them along), so a cool spot and fresh water every couple of days buys a few more.
The pot does half the work
A plant is only as good-looking as what it stands in. Scale is where most arrangements go wrong: a big plant in a small pot looks top-heavy and tips over, while a small plant in a big pot looks forgotten. Terracotta breathes and suits the light here; glazed ceramic holds water longer, which is either useful or the whole problem, depending on who does the watering.
And put something under it. A saucer, or a cork mat at the very least, because a pot on a wooden sideboard leaves the same white ring as a glass of water, only more slowly. (Getting that ring out again is in our notes on furniture care.)
Outside, the same rules apply with more sun, and one plant too big to be sensible usually does more for a terrace than six small ones; that argument is in garden furniture in the Algarve. Vases, planters and the other decorative pieces are in the complements collection at both H&P Mobiliário e Decoração showrooms, in Albufeira and Armação de Pêra. Bring a photo of the corner you have in mind, and tell us which way it faces.
