Ultimate SYNGONIUM (Arrowhead Vine) CARE Guide — Ep. 208

let's talk about the care of arrowhead vine otherwise known as syngonium podophylum [Music] now you may see syngonium being sold as naphthitis and that was its older name but nephthitis is still a viable genus it's just not the genus of this plant any longer but this is an example of an ethitis and i had actually featured this in 365 days of plants this is nephthitis swanii and this is a genus that has around six species i believe and then the syngonium however has probably six times that many species but the one in particular that we're going to discuss today is the more common one that we find cultivars of in the horticultural market and that is syngonium podophylum now this species is native to central and south america and it's found in like moist forests and it's hemi-epiphytic which means that it's partially growing on trees but also spends part of its life in terra firma as well now even though it's native to those regions i have seen this growing in lots of places that it's not supposed to be as like an escapee or an invasive species in places as far-reaching as indonesia i've seen it in singapore it's in florida growing up on trees so for all my viewers who are in that tropical and subtropical climates of the world please be very careful don't just toss this plant outside or at least consult with someone before planting it up in your landscape because what happens is that it often displaces native plants and isn't really a benefit likely to your native insect species for instance now people like me who live in the cold northeast you have nothing to worry about because until climate change like wipes out all of our winters and we return to a climate like in the devonian period the winters will kill this plant off if you've like tossed it onto your compost pile and you'll likely have no invasion problems whatsoever but let's talk a little bit more about the morphology of this plant because it's actually pretty cool because it exhibits something called heterophily which is changes in leaf shape as it matures so almost all the plants that we get with this arrowhead shape is in juvenile form i think this is this one if you look at um a little bit closer this seems to be in its like pure juvenile form but then as the plant matures we and it starts to climb up a little bit more and anchor and get more adequate light it'll start getting three leaflets so you'll start to see this it's got this like more defined uh arrowhead and it's kind of moving towards the three leaflets and then you see this one and this one actually has the defined three leaflets and i've seen them get even more leaflets and i'm talking like 10 11 12 leaflets on a leaf so this is the same plant it's just exhibiting that heterophily as i mentioned which is switching its form now this is a plant in general that will want to vine hence the second part of its common name arrowhead vine and when you get it you may think like wait is this going to vine because it's actually quite compact when we start to grow it in our house you'll start to see that it will start to adopt that habit of trying to vine so you're going to get like plants i've had these growing in my house for years now and you can see that they start to get a little bit unwieldy and you have to kind of stake them up unless you're actually growing them like on a sphagnum pole now some of the cultivars actually have a little bit more of kind of a dwarf habit or they won't vine so they're it's called like self-heading syngonium and i think like pink illusion is one that i've seen is a common cultivar that stays quite bushy for a while and then white butterfly which i think this one is is gets a little less unruly and i actually brought this over from the senior living center that i volunteer at and this one was growing in kind of full sun and has remained quite bushy except for a few other ones that are starting to like look like it's going to their regular habit of vining now as the leaves start to mature and move away from that arrowhead shape it'll start to get longer and longer petioles which this is the petiole it's the stock that attaches the leaf blade to the actual stem now knowing that this is the way the plant likes to grow you can have it scramble over taller plants or on a trellis or bamboo stake as i have if you're obviously outdoors and it's planted in your landscape then it'll probably climb up trees but again remember if you're in a subtropical tropical landscape you want to make sure that it's not going to be an invader there now it's common also to see these plants in hanging baskets and they'll start to hang down in kind of like weird ways now if you think it actually looks too scraggly then you can actually prune it and maintain the shape and the form of the plant so for instance this one's actually clipped a little bit here i noticed that it's um it's broken here so what i'm going to do is actually cut it right where it was broken and then i'll cut it behind one of these sections or even another section and i could actually propagate this up quite easily and quite readily i could either put that in a nice potting medium or i could actually put this in water and do water propagation now if you do give it a substrate to crawl and cling on to and it can adhere to just about anything i mean it'll i've seen it grow on like metal you could you could grow it on brick it's it's pretty impressive but what happens is it kind of develops these long smoothish ariel roots and what happens is that these roots are at the nodes and when they find a surface they'll start to lie flat on that surface horizontally and then they gradually kind of turn up at the end so if it kind of attaches to your wall it'll go like this so it's like a little nike swoosh now the one thing i found is that if you're trying to remove those aerial roots from the surface because you're like oh no i don't want that like growing on my brick wall then you'll actually likely damage those roots and they don't really recover so you do have to watch out for that um if if you just you know are growing it up to on something make sure it's that thing that you want it growing up all the time now i will say like its related cousins dipembakia or dum cane it does have these calcium oxalate crystals that are toxic to pets and kids if you eat them but if you handle these plants when they're young they have been actually reported to be irritating because of the crystals in syngoniums actually have this microscopic needle that can get dislodged and it might give you some light irritation on the skin especially if you're someone who has like sensitive skin and you're propagating these plants a lot so just be mindful of that i just thought i'd actually throw that out there in case you feel like you're actually breaking out from these plants i don't personally break out from these plants but i'm also not like always constantly cutting and propagating them all right so let's get to how we're going to grow this in our home now in regards to light keep in mind that these plants are grown in fairly bright light conditions in the greenhouse but in your interior space they can be acclimated to fairly low light but will also thrive in full sun too so where i volunteer at the senior living center this syngonium is literally growing outside in this pot and it's definitely one of the the bushy types like i mentioned i think this is probably a white butterfly cultivar and it handles full sun like a pro but i have my syngoniums growing in all different light conditions in my home and they handle it just fine as i shared these are from sub-tropical and tropical climates and these plants love humidity and if you could get that humidity up then it's perfect and actually they'll start to develop more of those aerial roots if you get that humidity up you know obviously you know my home is not humid all the time so i think they actually do quite well and you don't want to have so much humidity in your house that will actually promote mold growth in your home so keeping it just kind of in that mid-range is going to be perfect now as far as temperature goes for synconiums as you can imagine this plant is tropical so it can get chilling injury now 55 degrees fahrenheit or like 13 degrees celsius is about as low as it like to go so really if you could keep it up 60 degrees fahrenheit or like 16 degrees celsius it's going to be pretty advisable for this plant so no drafty windows and no air conditioning i will say that i read one study that when the plants were in full sun and the temperature got too high like 104 degrees fahrenheit that's like 40 degrees celsius there was also leaf injury like the chlorophyll will start to degrade and the color the leaves will bleach out and i would just say the ones that are variegated like this syngonium podophylum albo varagata you know you don't want this too much in the sun because some of those a chlorophyllus parts of the of the leaf that are like yellow or white are going to probably damage a little bit more so you want that pulled back a little bit from the sun now because these are hemi epiphytes you may want to consider using a potting medium with some more grit so see what the grower is actually using but it can be a mix of like peat and fur bark and perlite and vermiculite i've even heard of folks using biochar in these mixes which produce like really really strong plants but we don't really get biochar in kind of like the interior plant medium so i would say if you have something like uh you know like an organic orchid or bromeliad mix because this is more for epiphytic plants or hemipathetic plants and then this is like vermiculite and this is perlite and perlite will promote more drainage vermiculite also produces more drainage but will also kind of maintain some of that moisture as well which would be fine for these plants because a lot of times these plants are also growing in and around riparian areas but outdoors they get the benefit of a lot of airflow and we don't always have that in our home so you've got to let the soil dry out between watering and and they can really handle a little bit of dryness surprisingly i mean i'm not fully watering my plants all the time and this never gets watered it actually just like relies on rain water now it does have a little bit of a moisture mix out here but i i think this just goes to show you that these really thrive in outdoor conditions and throwing like a little cutting outside in an area in a compost heap might actually start to root up really easily now you do want to make sure though that you have that airy mixture indoors because they do get bacterial infections and will rot if they are kept too wet now i tried synchonium in my green wall but it always failed largely because it stayed too wet for too long and then it will just get like a bacterial infection as i mentioned as far as fertilizing when you're watering the plant you can also fertilize it if you have a liquid fertilizer now a well-balanced fertilizer even one with like a higher nitrogen will totally do and you might want a higher nitrogen because you might want to green up the plant and this plant is more about its leaves than it is about its blooms so if you're fertilizing it just remember do that in the growing season and if it's growing really vigorously then you might want to do the fertilizing on a bi-weekly basis these plants will grow and i talked a little bit about the pruning but propagation can be easily done as well even when you're pruning so you can do tip cutting so something like this i could just take a little cutting off like this and it has you know like a node right here where the leaves are coming out and then if you just kind of put this up in a sphagnum mixture or you could put it in vermiculite you could put it in a you know kind of a peat perlite mixture or even just water propagation all of this i mean it's so easy to propagate these guys but in the trade these plants are largely cultivated by tissue culture so that's why i think they are readily available and actually quite affordable plants some of the the problems that come with these plants i talked a little bit about bacterial rot plants could get bacterial and or fungal infections if they stay too wet and they could get some blight spots on their leaves as well so those are like usually little round necrotic spots and if you have one of the vining types and their internodes are super long then you may want to give them some more overhead light if possible if you want to keep a little bit more of a bushy form but if you have a cultivar that's just going to vine it's going to vine no matter what and if you have one that's a little bit more like a bushy type then you could just you know keep it bushy because anything that comes out and is starting to vine out like this just you know again clip it back and then keep that bushy look now the plants are also susceptible to typical plant pests like mites mealybugs thrips fungus gnats especially if you're over watering the plant aphids you know it really runs the gamut but i really haven't had major issues as to pests on these plants i think at the end of the day rot is the biggest issue especially if you're growing these indoors and i don't know what else i mean i think that's just about it when it comes to syngonium podophylum or arrowhead vine care so let me know what you thought about it and tell me what cultivars you're growing in your home in the comments below alright guys see you later did you know that you can be a supporter of plant one on me well take a look at our sustaining membership because through your direct support it helps allow us to keep producing high quality videos and some of the easiest ways that you could support are liking the video subscribing to the channel and hitting that notification button to get these videos delivered to your 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Channel: Summer Rayne Oakes

Views: 177,060

Keywords: Summer Rayne Oakes, Homestead Brooklyn, Plant One On Me, houseplants, indoor plants, house plants, houseplant care, arrowhead vine, arrowhead vine plant, arrowhead vine plant in water, arrowhead vine care, Syngonium care, Syngonium propagation, Arrowhead vine cuttings, Arrowhead vine plant propagation, arrowhead vine yellow leaves, syngonium plant care, syngonium podophyllum care, syngonium collection, syngonium albo variegata care, syngonium white butterfly, syngonium plant

Id: qTB-h5x_yfc

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 24 2020