Single Mother (Chlorophytum comosum)

A few jobs ago, I remember a Puerto Rican co-worker saying that she wanted to give her mother a plant for . . . some kind of event, I forget. Mother's Day, or a birthday, something like that. The problem was that she didn't think her mother was especially good with plants, so it needed to be something fairly low-maintenance. I forget what all we discussed, but I do remember suggesting a "spider plant" to her and being met with blank looks. A what?

Oh, um, they're also called "airplane plants," they used to be really popular in the 70s, kinda grassy-looking, with a white stripe down the middle of the leaves, you know. They get little baby plants on runners?


Oh, she said. No, I think that would just be weird.

Why weird? What's weird about it?

Well, she said, in Puerto Rico, they call that plant "mala madre," which translates as "bad mother." That might be awkward, as a gift for your mother.

Guess so, yeah. I retract the suggestion.

I never really found out why the plant is thought of as being a bad mother. I don't even know if the problem is supposed to be that it holds the baby plants too tightly to itself, or not tightly enough. Maybe it's something else entirely. So the whole thing is kind of weird for me to think about, but nevertheless, there it is.

I've also run into customers who had issues with this because it's called "spider plant;" arachnophobes or something, I guess. So it doesn't really catch any breaks in the naming department, in any language, so from here out we'll be using the scientific name, which is in Greek and Latin: Chlorophytum comosum.¹


Chlorophytum comosum is a houseplant of fairly long standing; it's native to South African forest floors and has been kept as an indoor plant for decades. The wild plant is solid green; plants with white or yellow variegation are sports that have been kept going by propagating plantlets.

Chlorophytum comosum can be perpetuated more or less indefinitely: the picture immediately above is of my husband's plant, originally a gift from his mother, which he has managed to keep going through seven generations. This seventh one has yet to produce any plantlets, which is unusual but not unheard of: sometimes they take a long time to do this. The growers' guide says that "plantlet production is distinctly photoperiod related," and claims that variegated varieties produce more plantlets during short days, while solid green varieties send out runners during long days. This might be correct, but I think there's got to be more to it than that, because my husband's plant has been around for a couple years now and hasn't made any runners at all yet, irrespective of day length. A different source says that bright light and long days will encourage offsets regardless of variety. Both say that "interrupting" the plant during the night by turning a light on it will encourage production of runners as well. I don't care enough to try this personally, but feel free.

The way this plant is usually grown is in hanging baskets, as in this picture:


The reason for this is that hanging baskets permit the runners to hang over the edge of the pot, which creates a waterfall / cascade sort of effect that a lot of people like. Because of this, they're excellent plants to use when you want to block out an unpleasant view. Individual plantlets die from time to time, though infrequently: every so often I pick a couple out of the monster plants at work. Exposing plantlets to a lot of hot, dry air is a good, efficient way to kill them, if that's something you're into.

To propagate, just pull off one of the plantlets (they come off pretty easily, which may be why I find dead ones on the monster hanging baskets from time to time) and stick it in dirt, or water. The only way they'll fail, as far as I can tell, is if you keep them in sopping wet soil, and even then it's pretty difficult to kill them: the best you can do usually is just kind of disappoint them a little.


Plantlets will outgrow small pots in a matter of weeks, given good (bright, warm, humid) conditions, though they don't seem to mind terribly if they're potbound. Given even more time, however, the continuing growth of the roots will eventually push the whole root ball up and out of the pot, a phenomenon which also occurs with asparagus ferns (Asparagus setaceus, A. densiflorus 'Myersii' and A. densiflorus 'Sprengeri') and occasionally with Sansevieria trifasciata, though it's faster for Asparagus and slower for Sansevieria.

There are not actually all that many things that can go wrong with Chlorophytum comosum, as befits the extremely low difficulty level above. What problems do exist tend to be cosmetic, rather than potentially lethal.

The most common is tip burn: the tips of the leaves turn black and begin to die back towards the center of the plant. There are a number of factors which contribute to this, but generally the problem is that the soil has built up a level of fluoride, sodium, or boron which is harmful to the plant. Extreme heat (prolonged exposure to temperatures above 90ºF) can also result in tip burn. According to a few sources, including my growers' guide, the specific substance causing the burn can be determined from its appearance: sodium causes black tips, boron causes tan or gray tips, and fluoride causes reddish tips. (High temperature or excessive light is said to lead to light gray or yellowish patches, not necessarily at the leaf tips, though the plants we've moved closer to a heat source at work have mostly just gotten black tips, in those cases where there was a reaction.) Excess sodium is probably from softened water; excess boron is probably from overfertilization; excess fluoride is probably from overfertilization or too much perlite in the soil,² though in a few cases the water may just contain a lot of fluoride naturally and you have no choice but to switch to bottled, distilled, or reverse-osmosis water.

In any of these cases, flushing the soil heavily and thoroughly with regular tap water isn't going to hurt anything, and may help the plant a little bit in the short term. If you are not watering your plants until water runs through the bottom of the pot and then discarding the water that runs through, or if (worse!) you are using a pot without drainage holes, you're going to build minerals up in the pot to the point where tip burn of some kind or another is more or less inevitable.

Chlorophytum comosum are also "heavy breathers," for lack of a better term. This means that they are said to be very good at removing chemicals from the air,³ and the NASA study that showed that plants could clean air was particularly effusive on the advantages of Chlorophytum comosum. The down side to this is that they also breathe deeply of stuff that can harm them, including ethylene (a very small component of natural gas, and also a plant hormone released through a variety of processes; click the link for details), certain insecticides (notably chlorpyriphos), and bleach (which is probably the most relevant chemical for our purposes, since it's the one you're most likely to use around the plant). The solution? Try not to use bleach, or the certain insecticides, near the plant, and if you must, then provide good ventilation.


Diseases and pests, on the other hand, are not usually a problem. Mealybugs (including the dread root mealybug) and scale are specifically mentioned here and there, as are caterpillars, though caterpillars aren't likely to be problems inside, and mealybugs and scale don't seem to be common problems. In the event that you have mealybugs or scale, my recommendation would be that you just take a plantlet off and start over, but if you really want to try to save the parent plant, I'd skip the rubbing-alcohol step and go directly to the systemic insecticide, whether this be imidacloprid or something else. The growers' guide recommends bendiocarb, S-kinoprene, or acephate, though I couldn't promise you that these are available for home use.

This might all sound pretty bad (tip burn! chemical sensitivity!), but if this is the worst you got, you have a pretty easy plant on your hands. Honest. Light levels can range from filtered sun down to moderate (light that's too low will slow or stop new growth, and leaves will droop noticeably). Watering is also flexible: the roots can store a lot of water to get a plant through a drought, and plants can also roll with a wet spell, though neither extreme is tolerated indefinitely. Humidity is essentially a non-issue, though extremely dry air may bring on or accelerate tip burn. Feeding should be minimal to nonexistent: they don't need much in the first place, and too much will just cause problems, especially if your fertilizer preparation includes boron.

Chlorophytum comosum will not survive really cold temperatures, but it can go down to just above freezing before it's actually damaged, and it actually can freeze and then come back in spring, I'm told, so cold isn't a huge issue. (Not that the plant is any happier to almost die and then struggle back than you would be: I'm not recommending leaving your plants outside in the winter if they're going to freeze.) I expected to find that it was an invasive species somewhere, just because the runners and rapid growth rate seem custom-made for invasiveness, but it really hasn't been an enormous problem anywhere as far as I could find, though it has established itself in a few Pacific islands.

There are a few cultivars, though the differences between some of them are extremely minor. The 'Hawaiian' version has yellowish variegation instead of white: my personal plant (the little one in the photo after the how-to-propagate paragraph) is a 'Hawaiian.' 'Bonnie' has leaves which curl dramatically, often all the way around to the underside of the pot (the previous photo of the hanging basket is a 'Bonnie'). There are also varieties with the variegation pattern reversed (i.e. white edges and green center), though the cultivar names begin getting confusing at this point so I'm going to drop the subject in a moment. There are pictures and side-by-side comparisons of some of the cultivars on these pages, and the author gives every indication of knowing what he's talking about: the species, 'Bonnie,' 'Ocean,' 'Picturatum,' 'Silver Surfer,' 'Variegatum,' and 'Vittatum.'

So, what kind of mother is it really? Well, I couldn't say exactly, though overworked seems like a reasonable adjective for any plant that has this many children. And where is the father? Hmmm?


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Photo credits: first hanging basket (a 'Bonnie'): anonymous donation from a Garden Webber. Others: my own.

¹ The scientific name isn't much of an improvement either; it translates more or less as "long-haired green plant." But that's still better than "bad mother."
² Some minerals naturally also contain a lot of fluoride, including perlite and some phosphates. This is normally benign, but soil mixes containing a lot of perlite, or fertilizers with high phosphorous content (phosphorous is the middle number on the package: a fertilizer labeled 10-20-10 is a high-P fertilizer), may incidentally contain enough fluoride to cause a problem for sensitive plants.
³ I say "said to be" because I'm not quite sure I buy into the whole plants-as-removers-of-toxic-chemicals hype. I mean, I believe that they can absorb a lot of chemicals: benzene, trichloroethylene, formaldehyde, etc. I just question whether most people, under most circumstances, would be affected by the levels of the chemicals in question anyway, i.e., whether it matters that these plants are able to do this. That said, it's certainly not going to hurt you if they do take chemicals out of the air, and plants are nice for lots of other reasons, so whatever (see my longer essay on the subject here). I just worry that concern about vague environmental "toxins" is causing us to lose perspective about which things are actually dangerous.
My grandmother smoked herself into emphysema, but was phobic about microwaves because she read somewhere that they destroy nutrients, and she was adamant about not destroying nutrients. (Microwaves do destroy nutrients. So does heating them on the stove. So does exposing them to oxygen.) I can't complain too much, since I got a microwave as a result (her children bought her one because she was getting to the point of being too weak to cook for herself, as the result of the emphysema and related medical issues, so she wasn't eating – seriously, she weighed like 70-80 pounds when she died. But she wouldn't take the microwave, so they wound up taking it back, and somehow I ended up with it. Which was nice, because I had just moved, and kind of needed one.), but if she'd been as scared of smoking as she'd been of microwaves, she'd probably still be alive. Not to mention the convoluted logic of not eating any nutrients because you don't want to lose a fraction of them by cooking them in the microwave.
So are there dangerous chemicals out there? Sure. Are some of them in your home? No doubt. Are you breathing them in right this minute? Odds are. Are said chemicals going to be what kills you? I'd be surprised.