In natural convection in a porous medium heated from below, the convective flow in two dimensions becomes unsteady above a certain critical Rayleigh number and exhibits a fluctuating or oscillatory behaviour (depending on the confinement in the horizontal dimension). This fluctuating behaviour is due to a combination of the instability of the thermal boundary layers at horizontal boundaries together with a ‘triggering’ effect of earlier disturbances. The point of the origin of the instability of the thermal boundary layer appears to play a dominant role in determining the regularity of the fluctuating flow. This numerical study investigates the importance of this point of evolution and concludes that there may exist more than one oscillatory mode of convection, depending on its position. The investigation focuses on the symmetry of the flow and demonstrates that with stable and accurate numerical schemes, an artificial symmetry may be imposed in the absence of realistic physical noise. If an initially symmetric perturbation is imposed the flow retains an essentially symmetric flow pattern with a high degree of regularity in the oscillatory behaviour. The imposition of an asymmetric perturbation results in a degradation of regularity. The appearance of the symmetric, regularly oscillatory flow is characterized by a symmetric (and stationary) arrangement of the points of origin of the instability of the upper and lower thermal boundary layers; in the case of the irregular oscillations the points of origin are not symmetric and their locations are not fixed.