Why is your Golden Pothos not golden anymore? Many plants can lose their attractive patterns when all-green leaves replace the brilliant splashes of color in their foliage. This process is called reversion. Like most variegated plants, your Golden Pothos can revert, though you can often prevent this with the right care. Here’s what you should do to help it keep its brilliant speckles of creamy white and buttery yellow.
First of all, provide large amounts of bright, indirect light. Golden Pothos can revert in response to poor lighting, even though they can survive and grow in dim conditions. You should also prune away non-variegated foliage to keep it from taking over the plant.
Think of variegation as your Golden Pothos performing. It’s the icing on the cake; a little bonus beauty from a healthy and well-nourished plant. The most important thing you can do to keep your plant from reverting is to get your basic care techniques right. To stay variegated, your Golden Pothos needs to be thriving, not just surviving.
Why Do Golden Pothos Sometimes Revert?
Lots of plants have colorful patterns that are fairly stable. The iconic Laurentii Snake Plant, for example, retains its yellow stripes even in very poor environmental conditions. So what makes Epipremnum Aureum different? Why is it that the Golden Pothos can revert to green?
The answer has to do with where the color comes from. The multicolored appearance of a Golden Pothos is due to a mutation distributed randomly through the leaves. That’s why the bright yellow and creamy white colors are dappled so chaotically over the foliage. It’s called chimeric variegation.
This randomness makes variegated Pothos plants look very cool since each leaf has a unique distribution of colors. There’s a downside, though; the mutations can disappear just as unpredictably as they arise. The random shuffling of cells sometimes causes new stems to grow from an all-green section of the plant. Without any mutant yellow or white cells in the mix, all future growth from that point will be green.
Although this process is unpredictable, there are ways to reduce the odds of your Golden Pothos reverting. We’ll review the most important ones below.
Bright Light Helps Keep Your Pothos From Reverting
There’s a good reason most leaves in nature aren’t yellow and white. Photosynthesis, the process plants use to turn solar energy into food, relies on a green pigment called chlorophyll a. Those golden spots on your Golden Pothos have less of this crucial pigment than normal. As a result, the leaves don’t absorb as much energy as pure green leaves of the same size.
This isn’t a problem for your Pothos when it has all the light it needs and then some. But when sunlight is scarce, your plant is less interested in spending resources building and maintaining leaves with lower chlorophyll content. It may change its patterns of gene activation, replacing the variegated foliage with green leaves.
To stop your Golden Pothos from reverting, you need to keep it well-lit. These plants do best in bright, indirect light. In scientific terms, they prefer to receive between 10,000 and 20,000 lux for 8-14 hours per day. For maximum variegation, aim for the upper end of that scale.
Not sure how bright your plant’s current location is? You can measure it with an inexpensive gadget called an illuminance meter. It’s also possible to eyeball it by holding a piece of white paper behind the pot and analyzing the shadow. Ideally, it should have a clearly defined shape but slightly fuzzy edges.
How to Make Sure Your Golden Pothos Can Get Enough Light
If your Golden Pothos is looking a little less golden, try moving it closer to a window. Your plant’s sun exposure drops off sharply the further it is from its light source.
For best results, an Epipremnum should be within two feet of an eastern window or five to six feet from a southern window. You can put it even closer to a south-facing opening if you hang some filmy curtains up to scatter the light. Just make sure that you’re transitioning your Pothos into its new space gradually. If you increase its light exposure too fast, it won’t have time to adjust, and it could get burned.
A grow lamp is an even more reliable way to boost your plant’s energy levels. We like this simple, low-cost LED bulb. Hang it about a foot above your Golden Pothos for optimal lighting levels. For more details on proper lighting for Pothos plants, refer to this post.
Your Golden Pothos Can Revert if You Don’t Prune Properly
Good lighting helps keep a variegated plant from turning green but doesn’t prevent it completely. Even a well-fed Golden Pothos can revert due to the random distribution of mutated cells, as we discussed above. And since non-variegated foliage is more efficient at absorbing sunlight, it tends to grow faster. It can quickly leave the multicolored parts of your plant in the dust.
To keep this from happening, you’ll need to clip off any fully green shoots as soon as you spot them. Prune back until you hit a variegated growth node – this gives the vine another shot at growing multicolored foliage.
For reference, the nodes are the thick joints along the stem, often marked by a thin brown ring. Only the nodes can send out new leaves and stems, so when you’re pruning away green growth, cut off everything past the variegated node where you want new growth to pop up.
Always disinfect your pruning scissors with rubbing alcohol or one part bleach in nine parts water. This reduces the risk that you’ll give your Pothos an infection.
Frequent Propagation Helps Your Golden Pothos Stay Golden
The fewer vines your plant has, the greater the risk that it will randomly revert. Epipremnum Aureum grows from the stem tips only. It’s very rare for these plants to branch off to the sides without deliberate pruning.
So once a vine tip reverts, all further growth on that vine comes from green cells. Pruning back this green growth helps, but so does filling out your Golden Pothos by occasionally propagating variegated cuttings. That way, the impact of a single stem reverting is reduced. Here’s how to do this:
- Choose a section of stem to remove. It should include at least one or two leaves as well as a few bare nodes. If possible, the nodes closest to the tip of the vine should be noticeably variegated.
- Snip it off with disinfected scissors. Clip just below a growth node, slicing at a 45-degree angle. Get it in one clean cut if possible.
- Poke a small hole in the soil. Find a bare patch in your Golden Pothos pot and create a small opening for the stem. Poking a chopstick into the soil works well. Make the hole deep enough that at least one node will be underground.
- Plant the cutting. Slide the cut end into the hole you’ve made, then gently pack soil around it to hold it in place. As you wait for it to take root, keep it warm and humid while being careful not to water too much.
With a little bit of luck, these cuttings should grow into variegated vines. When your Pothos has lots of multicolored stems, you won’t be so worried if one or two revert. Plus, pruning stimulates growth, so the dappled vines you clipped should grow back with extra vigor.
Don’t Neglect Your Plant’s Other Needs
Sunlight and pruning are the most direct ways to keep your Golden Pothos variegated. However, that doesn’t mean its other growing conditions are less important. A Golden Pothos can revert in response to severe stress of any kind.
A healthy Pothos needs:
- Coarse, slightly moist soil. Epipremnum plants do best in soilless potting mix with lots of pores and gaps for drainage, as described in this post. Keep the area around the roots mildly damp by watering when the top one to two inches of soil dry out.
- Mild temperatures. The perfect range for a Pothos is between 65 and 85 degrees Fahrenheit. At a bare minimum, keep it above 55 degrees and below 95 to avoid reversion from temperature stress.
- Decent humidity. Your Golden Pothos will be happiest when the relative humidity is between 60% and 70%. If it drops below 50%, you’ll often see the leaves getting crispy and brown around the edges.
- Steady nutrition. Don’t go overboard, or you could harm your Pothos with an excess of mineral salts. A ½-strength dose of liquid fertilizer every four to six weeks (during the growing season only) should be perfect. Another option is to add an inch of compost to the pot every spring.
Final Thoughts
Keeping your plant variegated is mostly about maintaining good lighting and trimming green growth. But remember that a Golden Pothos can revert whenever its health is threatened. To ensure you’re able to continue showing off your Pothos’ brilliant golden coloring, you’ll want to keep pampering your plant.