Spider Plant Care: Brown Tips, Babies and Why It Stops

Nearly unkillable, and unusually honest about it — a spider plant tells you what is wrong through its tips before anything serious happens.

The basics

Those thick white tuberous roots are water storage, which is why the plant forgives being forgotten and does not forgive being waterlogged. When they fill the pot so completely that the whole root ball lifts out as a solid white mass, it is time — one size up, no more.

Brown tips

The most-asked question about this plant, and the answer is usually what you are watering it with.

Flushing the pot is worth doing every few months regardless: take it to a sink and run water through it for a minute or two, letting it drain fully. That washes out the accumulated salts that no amount of good watering will otherwise remove.

Browned tips do not turn green again. Trim them at an angle with scissors if they bother you, leaving a sliver of brown rather than cutting into green tissue.

Babies

Spiderettes appear on long arching stems — technically stolons — and a plant that makes none is usually being treated too well.

What suppresses them:

• Too large a pot. Energy goes into roots and leaves. A snug pot is the single biggest factor
• Not enough light. Medium light keeps a plant alive and stops it reproducing
• Too much nitrogen. Lush green foliage, no stolons
• Youth. Often a year or two before a plant starts
• Long day length. Flowering has a short-day element, so a plant under a lamp until midnight may never trigger

What encourages them: bright indirect light, a pot it has filled, light feeding, and leaving it alone. A plant that has been in the same pot for two years on a bright windowsill is usually covered in them.

Propagating

The reliable method, in order of success rate:

1. Pin it down while still attached — the best way.

1. Pick a spiderette showing small brown-white root nubs at its base
2. Sit a small pot of damp compost next to the mother plant
3. Pin the baby onto the surface with a bent paperclip or wire staple, still attached to its stolon
4. Keep lightly moist. It roots in two to three weeks while the mother plant feeds it
5. Cut the stolon once it is visibly growing

2. Cut and pot directly. Snip the spiderette off, plant into damp compost, keep it humid — a clear bag over the pot for a fortnight — and out of direct sun.

3. Water rooting. Easy and satisfying to watch, and the weakest of the three: water roots are brittle and translate poorly to compost. If you do it, move it into soil within a week or two of roots appearing, not after they are inches long.

Common problems

• Yellowing lower leaves — normal in small numbers; widespread means over-watering
• Mushy base, foul smell — root rot. Unpot, cut away black roots, repot into dry compost, and water far less
• Faded variegation — not enough light
• Sticky leaves, fine webbing — spider mites, which like dry air. Shower the plant, raise humidity, treat if it persists
• Limp, pale, refusing to grow in winter — usually cold, or a draught from a window

Outdoors

In zones 9 to 11 it is a genuine perennial groundcover for shade. Everywhere else it makes a good summer container or hanging-basket plant, in bright shade rather than sun, and comes back indoors before the first frost. Full outdoor sun bleaches it badly within days — move it out gradually.