Vivi's Roots | A Real Plant Parent's Guide & Journal

An anthurium in low light will stay alive. It will not die on you in a month, and it will not drop all its leaves — but it will stop flowering, and the new leaves it does push will be smaller than the ones it came home with. That is the honest verdict. Anthurium ( Anthurium andraeanum , the flamingo flower most shops sell) is a forest-floor plant, so it handles shade better than almost anything with a flower on it. What it cannot do is make flowers out of nothing. Flowers are expensive, and a dim room does not pay for them. The thing that actually kills anthuriums in dark rooms is not the darkness. It is watering the plant as if it were still in a bright room . Low light slows water use to a crawl; the same watering routine that worked by the window now drowns the roots. That is cause number one below, and it is most of the deaths. So: keep it if you like the leaves. If you bought it for the red spathes, you have a distance problem, not a plant problem, and the fix is usually under...

Snake plant brown tips are almost never the emergency they look like. In most flats, snake plant brown tips are scar tissue — a tiny area of leaf that died weeks or months ago from one short stress event, and which will stay brown forever because leaves do not heal. So here is the verdict in two parts. The existing brown tips are not coming back to green — no treatment, feed or misting reverses them. What you can actually control is whether new tips go brown, and that is nearly always about water: how often it arrives, what is dissolved in it, and whether the roots are healthy enough to move it. The one case that is urgent is different in feel: brown that is soft, mushy or spreading down the leaf from the tip, often with a sour smell at the soil. That is rot travelling, not a scar, and it needs the plant out of the pot today. This guide separates those two. Diagnose which one you have, fix the cause, and judge success by the new growth — not by the leaves you already have. ...

Calathea brown tips are the most common complaint about this plant, and the honest verdict is this: the browning you already have will not turn green again, but you can stop the next leaf from doing it. Dead leaf tissue stays dead — your only real target is the leaves that have not unfurled yet. The second thing to accept: brown tips on a calathea are rarely one problem. In an ordinary flat it is usually a stack of three — dry air from a radiator, tap water salts building up in the pot, and soil that swings between soaked and bone dry. Fixing only the humidity is why so many people get brown tips again two months later. Calathea ( Goeppertia species, still sold everywhere as Calathea ) is a forest-floor plant from humid tropical understorey. It is not a hard plant to keep alive. It is a hard plant to keep cosmetically perfect , and those are different goals. If you want zero brown edges in a dry radiator-heated room, you are fighting the room, not the plant. If you are deciding wh...