25 Calathea Species and Cultivars Ranked by Difficulty Level (for me)

[Music] this video was recently requested and also not so recently requested and i hesitated doing it because i didn't want to bring all of my calatheas into one spot to film so i could control the spread of spider mites but since i'm winning that battle in my house it's time to make this video it's going to be longer than 25 minutes so get some tea some coffee a snack whatever you need i'm gonna rank for you my calatheas from what i think are the easiest to take care of to the most difficult and one last note everything i'm about to share with you is entirely subjective what works for me might not work for you and what is easy for you might be difficult for me so just keep that in mind share your experiences where you agree or disagree in the comments and let's get started so this is a good time um to show you group a these are what i consider to be um easy to care for calatheas or good for beginners because all of the plants in my house underwent a lack of humidity spiderman outbreak air circulation fungal bacterial bacteria mold issues in the last half year and so let's see yeah how did they come out how did they all pull out of that much stress this first group did the best this is my calathea medallion certainly not the first the second or even the third medallion that i've ever had but this is one of my favorite calatheas it's a much larger one you can see what it looked like when i first got it up at the top i did end up hosing this down with tap water outside when i found spider mites on it and then these crispy tips developed pretty soon afterward and that will happen when you use tap water um especially because the plant is already really stressed and just from the spider mites alone the new growth looks really healthy it's bouncing back this plant is in an eastern window it gets direct morning sun partially filtered but it does get a little bit of direct morning sun this is my califia roofie barba and it came out of this whole stressful situation earlier this year with a few brown kind of crispier tips and that's about it this plant has done i would say pretty well considering what it's been through and it has seemed to be very resilient and bounced back now i do have to say that even though these are it seems like more at least in my home resilient calatheas that if i gave them a prolonged exposure to poor air circulation or if i wasn't providing distilled water or if they weren't able to eventually get back into a room with a humidifier a humidity level that they need that eventually all of these plants that i'm showing you even in this group would certainly decline and it would limit their life span pretty significantly they definitely need humidity for their vascular systems to be healthy so this is my makoyana i got this i don't remember exactly when i know i saw it on the shelf you can see up at the top at i think this is at lowe's and it had been top watered and was water stained and i very confidently in the video said no big deal i'm just going to wait for it to grow new foliage and it'll be fine it did it did even despite everything going on this makayana really did well and then let me tell you a secret about the makayana i have i thought this pot i bought it in had drainage holes because why would you ever put a okay i can't anyway so i had had a water catch tray on it and i never paid attention to the fact you know i try to water through somehow i haven't killed this plant and it hasn't suffered from root rot i don't know how um but again who puts plants in pots without drainage holes like in big box stores i don't understand but this calathea looks none the worse for it and i'm i'm very surprised this is my picture on a crimson now it was completely without a humidifier i was going through stuff when it came in and it's now in a humidified room and then i it fell off the shelf look at that the two newest leaves have been heavily damaged and i was pretty heartbroken however this plant dealt with a lack of humidity for a few months pretty well uh it didn't really show any signs of distress it didn't crisp up whatever you know you might see here and there on the leaves you know that those whatever those things are were already starting when i got it they were little tiny imperfections and they do get worse over time and i do need to dust it off still after it fell i just immediately put it back i was so aghast just um actually afraid a lot more had broken than just the two newest leaves here is my calathea dotty this plant is also in an eastern window it gets some direct sun in the morning and when i say direct that's through a screen and through blinds and through windows meant to protect my home from intense uv light and that are meant to be energy-saving so despite the fact that it'll get some sun rays they're not nearly at the strength that they would be if the plant was outside and it seems to do well it flowered this year pretty heavily and i in hindsight will not allow this dotty to flower again because it did really slow down the growth of new foliage and while it was novel and interesting to see it flower the flowers while beautiful are really tiny and nothing to write home about so yeah i'm not going to probably let this flower again but this has been a relatively easy calathea for me to take care of it hasn't required a lot this is a calathea illustrious it was a rescue plant um you can see it's got mostly new growth now if you look at this video though up at the top you can see it it was in really rough shape when i got it it wasn't looking good but i got it anyway and the same with the mako yana i said i'm just going to grow new foliage no big deal [Music] here you see the one of the oldest leaves that has two of these leaves and it's pretty rough but look at how dark that is it reminds me of like a fasciata maybe um the coloring but you can see the younger newer leaves have that really striking kind of lime green on the surface of the leaf and it's got some new growth it's still growing it's size wise the leaves are maybe bigger than what are on my dotty but the plant right now because i did start cutting back some of its older growth as the new growth came in it's a little smaller this is a cora i just got this not too long ago at all it is in a room that gets light from a south facing window and this plant didn't have the right humidity for the first couple of months i would say that it was in my house maybe the last or maybe it's more like six to eight maybe six weeks now it does have it has a relationship with the illustrious this is the cora and i'll probably i want to do a video about that but it's been really resilient it's had a ton of new growth very healthy and that also helps that when i get some of these plants the rescue plants that i've showed you are a little bit they're not really i mean in terms of difficulty they're not even that difficult it's more of giving them what they need and waiting but when you get a calathea like this that's already really healthy when you get it it makes it much easier so keep that in mind that if you want a very specific healthier but maybe um it didn't it doesn't look healthy you might think about the fact that you're going to have a harder time with it getting it looking how you want it and is it worth it might be worth it to wait and tell more of that type of califor on the market and easier to get and then you can start with a healthier plant and i've definitely bought some pretty poorly calathea um and waited a long time this is group b so i say this is the intermediate group these calathea you know it is important to make sure they're getting what they need otherwise you are going to see visible signs uh more quickly than group a and some of these plants when i got them they were either really immature or they were not in great health or they had a problem when they arrived and so we'll go over these too and from a distance i would say they all look pretty good but we're gonna just like with group a we're gonna go in a little bit closer and see what happens when you've got fungal bacterial issues spider mites that break out an inability to provide humidity over time now this is my califia margarita and you can see what it looked like when i got it up there that's after i just potted it this plant is not terribly difficult but i would say that if you're not able to give it the right humidity you're going to see signs pretty quickly and it's going to crisp up it's going to start to lose leaves usually it'll it'll lose its older leaves um however it is more sensitive to a lack of humidity some of these spots you see it came with i'm not sure what they're from but you can also see i need to clean the leaves on this i treated this plant with a neem oil soil dredge and a topical treatment of neem oil and all of the calories that you've seen have been through that process here so uh i don't know what to say about this plant um this is what it looked like when i got it up at the top you see how the leaves are curled kind of like tacoed in so they stayed like that they never opened back up and when i unpotted the plant later i saw that it had root damage like a root rot and so i removed its old dead roots and tried to treat the what looked like ones that i could keep and i had to regrow the plant leaf relief so it regrew [Music] i would say that with this plant though i know that humidity is vital and it also needs to get the right amount of sun this is still a juvenile plant it was by no means a mature plant when i got it and then having to regrow it leaf relief it sets back the progress of the plant so the plant while it should be maturing now isn't the calathea museum probably has it's it's speaking with a lawyer and is going to be filing a suit and a couple of my other calatheas are going to join it in the lawsuit i think um this is a humidity issue a thousand percent uh it really suffered from the fact that i wasn't able to keep a humidifier in the room with it and the tips just really crisped up the newest growth and the new growth that's coming in down here it looks really good and i think so long as i'm able to keep up a higher humidity it'll bounce back however the museeka for me in my house is very sensitive to a lack of humidity and just won't tolerate it it probably put up with the lack of humidity for i would say two to three weeks um and it maybe it wasn't putting up with it but the the signs didn't show up it took that long for it to start browning up at the tips this is my calathea rosie and this is a little bit of a warning to people about topical neem oil so i sprayed this plant down and i found spider mites on it and so i hosed it down and so it's got some burns on the tips from tap water and you can see its size relative to the margarita there and then i um i gave it the topical treatment and then i think it got a little bit too close to a light source and little burns started showing up around the plant so just remember that when you use use neem oil on a plant it is oil when heat comes around it you can definitely burn up your plant um now this plant was a little bit further back this is my other rosy and it did it did quite a bit better um it i could really see that the difference and what ended up happening between this plant and the other this one i didn't have to hose off with like uh tap water i was able to use distilled water because it has a lot fewer leaves and they're much easier to get to and that's because when i first got it i killed one of its rhizomes so it has less rhizomes than the smaller rosy does so that was because i was being greedy and i divided the plant really early another no no so this is my calatheas and ariana i just got this i think it's a sand ariana i did a video about this around the ornata and the all of the species that get lumped in to the ornata group and this one had a lot of damage um to some of its leaves that is just mechanical i don't know if this happened in shipping or what but aside from that let's just the plant looks great the rest of its growth is fine and yet that's because it's been in a room with a humidifier getting the right amount of light getting all of its needs met the way that they're supposed to be and so you can see the comparison but what i'm saying is though this had to be in a room that had more than 50 humidity with good indirect light with distilled water and with preventative treatments like a neem oil preventative treatment to make sure that you know it didn't come down with the spider mite infection that was hopping around so it's possible to keep them healthy it's just you have to have that right environment and so this is a princess jesse and when i got this plant the leaves already had some markings on them it had some strange brown spots in the center of the leaves and those have only gotten worse i've been trying to keep my plants in the nursery pots that they come in and not repot them right away it was a mistake with this one when i pulled this one out it very obviously because it started to me to look like bacterial issues possibly in the soil and yes i was right about that there was a lot going on in the soil that was not good i'm really glad that i repotted it i think it's going to bounce back pretty quickly and then be easier to take care of but just keep that in mind you know when you see something i you know i wanted to make sure i was right before i just pulled it out of its pot but in hindsight i wish i had done it a little bit earlier but just to give you a size comparison of where this princess jesse is compared to some of the other calabia i have now this halo probably it i this got probably the [Music] i would say it got some of the worst light while all of the kind of chaos was going on and so it slowed its growth and then the lack of humidity crisped it up pretty quickly so it did have some crispy tips when i got it no big deal um those do get worse over time but they got worse a lot faster than i expected if you see that leaf there in the back and that's just that lack of humidity and just again a size reference you can see it's not the light it's by no means the largest calathea i have but it's it's a mature plant it's not a juvenile plant um but i am gonna have to regrow some of this growth and even though i'm giving it great light now i think it's it's still it's taking a while to come around so think about that with the the light and if you don't see your kelothia's growing so here's the picture out of argentia this is where i found the fungal and the spider mites first and this plant's really matured since i got it you can see it's very compact there and now it's taking the form that you'd see of it as it matures which i guess looks a little bit leggy but this is what they end up kind of looking like and it gets a lot of light that's not the issue um the issue is that i sprayed it with tap water this one got it three or four times um and it also had what looked like kind of i couldn't tell if it was fungal or bacterial issues in the soil so i had to treat and take care of that and it this one took about five months to really get under control um i thought i was going to lose the plant a few times but its new growth looks great and i'm slowly removing that older damaged growth but again you can't mess around with the plant because it it will take a downturn really rapidly now my version of its eye i'm pretty sure is in the lawsuit with the museaca and i firmly deserve this during that this planet just didn't get the right humidity so it's got a lot of humidity stress um it's got water stress and worse than that i never talked about what it had a soil aeration issue and i showed that in a video but there's something that i never told you about and that is that this plant i don't think i did got knocked out of its pot multiple times it was in a like a planter like a stand that didn't work and the last time it got knocked over somebody had just picked it at the root ball up and put it back in the pot so the roots had been exposed for days and then when i got to it um i didn't have soil i realized um i was running out of what i needed to make my own mix and then i needed to order just what i could find while there was a shortage of a lot of things and then it just it's it's been through it and it's all my fault um but all of these plants will recover but they're going to have to be in a room where i control humidity and light and air circulation pretty intensely like i really keep an eye on it now here's group c i'd say that this is definitely the group for me that's been advanced care that if you do not provide or meet its requirements these plants will show you their displeasure [Music] very early on and they have plenty of reason to be displeased with me considering what's gone on in the house in the last six months so [Music] just like the other groups we'll go through this one by one um this sabrina i bought basically as a plant let if you can see it up there in the corner and it is now starting to grow leaves that are about double in size so it's starting to mature i think it's going to mature into a juvenile plant in this growing season i'm very excited but it has more than once completely gone limp and looked like it was just going to die or it was dead and part of this had to do with i'm sure with humidity and then part of this had to do with something i don't really understand honestly what happened what i do know is i will not be buying plant luts in the future they are you have to meet all of their care requirements immediately or you are going to have a stunted plant that at maturity is not very healthy or strong now these are just older leaves on my white tiger they're going to crisp up and die right um i'm not too worried about that but some of these leaves down here this is humidity stress and its new growth looks great because it's in a room that's got 50 to 60 humidity and it's getting great light but i'm gonna have to regrow all of the leaves down there and so any any growth i was hoping to see in the plan and seeing this plant get larger or bigger this growing season those hopes are dashed i'm pretty sure that what i'm going to be able to do is get it to replace its damaged leaves and that's about it and i'm gonna have to probably wait until next spring to see if i can really get the plant thriving as opposed to bouncing back and i'm not gonna lie this is supposedly an easier plant than this fusion white it's not that's not my experience so this is my fusion white um now that's what it looked like when i first got it and then it had humidity stress and i regrew every single leaf of a video about it if you're interested and you know it it looks okay but it's small it's tiny this is the complaint i hear about the fusion white is they just don't get very big and i would agree i would say the larger ones i see are actually not fusion whites there's something else um they're usually a variegated calathea as opposed to the hybrid patented fusion white but you can see it how small it is in comparison with these other plants the white tiger's a juvenile it was a juvenile when i got it the zabrina was a plant lot and this i don't know what this is in size comparison it's smaller but it's lovely don't get me wrong it's a b they're all beautiful plants i would just say as far as the care goes a little bit more difficult and this my white star my majestica this is hung in there pretty well um the brown marks you see in the center of the leaf that's my fault uh those are sunburns i don't know what else to say i'm so embarrassed that's from the sun now this this plant came from plannerina.com and it was such an impressive specimen when i got it and i'm showing this to you because the only reason why it only has a couple of sunburn here sunburns here and maybe a few crispy tips is because this plant was in optimal health when i got it it was a mature plant it was strong it had gotten everything that it needed as it was growing into a mature plant so that it is much more resilient it is much stronger than some of the other calatheas that you see that i have that i maybe got as plant lut or as juvenile plants so it was able to withstand the fact that it went a short period without uh humidity that it needed and uh it's bouncing back it's looking good i have a lot of high hopes for this plant eventually these usually look a little bit more like that picture out of argentia they start to get much taller less compact so we'll see what that looks like over time now the fukata is in the lawsuit with the varsivitsi eye and the uh museeka so the fukada absolutely hates me and uh it needs a lot of humidity and i messed up it's still flowering though i don't think that's really any remarkable feat these these calathea flower very easily if given the right light and uh i don't know what to say this might be a a calathea i can't keep in my house um we'll see as it starts to get some more new growth we'll see what happens with it but this is if that you can't give a calathea what it needs they start looking like this right this is this is how it starts to go and the care requirements can be maybe higher than what you're able to give in your home and like me i have to think about whether or not i can keep a fukata i certainly would never buy another one at this point and not because they aren't lovely plants because they don't do well in my home the same thing with this i think it's a misto it was sold to me as a maui queen um you know this is all humidity stress it's tips just crisped up and uh it looked fine it didn't look actually that bad until this whole kind of disaster happened and then it it didn't it kind of went downhill quickly and even its new growth shows like humidity stress as it comes up um it has a couple of new leafs that have no humidity stress i'm not sure if you can see them here but um yeah it's got a few that are fine that are newer leaves and um maybe if i can keep this at like above 50 humidity for the rest of the growing season i can see it replace some more of these leaves and maybe get rid of the crispy tips but maybe not again this might just be a calathea that doesn't work in my home so this is group c these are what i consider to be more advanced care calatheas and calatheas that you really need to know how to figure out what it is they need and how to fix them or you're going to have problems now this is my group x it's kind of my unknown variable group um i just got these recently to my home and so i'm going to make some predictions for you about what i think they'll be like this is abandoned hekai ecuadoriana and a louise and i would say i'm going to say the van and heck i would be in group b the louise a possibly group c and equidoriano group a all day the ecuadoriana it is amazing it feels like a calathea that is from another planet it's got these very strange rubbery leaves very textured and beautiful the luisa in person is one of the most striking calobia i've ever seen and i still can't get over it i never actually wanted one i would see them all the time and or hybrids of them and it just didn't you know but no regrets it's a beautiful plant and i'd buy it again a million times um this ecuadoriana though is really beautiful it has some damaged leaves from shipping i think but it's gonna it's gonna bounce back it's got some humidity stress on the lower leaves we'll see how it does this year and the abandoned hekai i think this is just going to be a little bit easier i think it's going to be a little bit more resilient you can see how happy i am though this is as i was unboxing them and just thrilled because they're beautiful they're for the most part you know they're mature plants and so they've got a much better shot and because i've got all of the conditions taken care of i really do feel like it's going to be possible for me to to keep them looking good and as long as we don't have any emergencies in the near future i think that these plants will stay looking really healthy and any damage stuff they've got now i'm going to be able to take care of between now and the next growing season so i will say about the vanden hekai though it did lose so far a few of its leaves they yellowed up now that definitely happens not just with calatheas but with a lot of different plants after shipping as they're acclimating to the home the changes in soil moisture etc um going from being bare roots in soil that maybe they're not used to um you know you'll get a few of the leaves that yellow up and then they brown up and they fall away but otherwise um you know the louise and the ecuadoriana haven't had any leaves do that by the way it's only been about in heck i so maybe i've got my groups wrong maybe my predictions are off but i'm so pleased with these califia i hope that you've enjoyed the video today please again this is just my experience if you have different experiences with calathea if you've got care tips if you would put these in a different order or in a different group let me know until next time be well and take care

Channel: Addy Beez

Views: 171,912

Keywords: calathea collection, calathea, calathea tour, calathea care, calathea medallion, calathea rosy, calathea zebrina, calathea ornata, calathea margarita, calathea halo, calathea misto, calathea louisae, calathea rufibarba, calathea illustris, calathea cora, calathea picturata crimson, calathea fusion white, calathea white tiger, calathea white star, calathea whitestar, calathea vandenheckei, calathea ecuadoriana, calathea concinna freddie, calathea dottie, calathea musaica

Id: YQzI2Ti61fA

Length: 27min 40sec (1660 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 19 2020