Spider Plant
Chlorophytum comosum
also called chlorophytum
Arching striped leaves, tough enough for almost any shelf — but fussy about what comes out of the tap, and the brown tips are the tell.
- Type
- Houseplant · Perennial
- Botanical family
- Mixed / other
- Foliage color
- Variegated with white · Green
- Sunlight
- Bright to moderate indirect light, out of direct sun.
- Watering
- Let the top 3–4 cm of the potting mix dry before watering again.
- Feeding
- Feed once a month, in spring and summer only.
- Frost tolerant
- No
- Flowering
- May
- Pruning
- Pull away dead leaves and trim brown tips when they appear.
- Mar–May Spring Growth
- May–Dec Flowering
- Jan–Mar Flowering
- Plant spacing
- 15.7 in
- In-row spacing
- 15.7 in
- Between rows
- 19.7 in
- Square-foot density
- Not suited to SFG
- Root system
- Swollen storage roots
- Working depth
- 8–20 in
- Can reach
- 3 ft down where the soil allows
- Spread
- 16–24 in across, about 1–1.5× the width of the plant
- Shallowest pot
- 14 in of soil
The fat roots are the larder and the thin ones do the feeding. Lift them or mulch them deeply where the ground freezes hard, and handle them by the crown: a snapped storage root rots rather than heals.
Fat white water-storing roots that fill a pot completely and eventually push the plant up out of it. That reservoir is why a spider plant forgives being forgotten, and repotting every year or two is all it asks in return.
The habit is Spider Plant’s own; the figures are what that habit usually comes to at this size, not a measurement of this species. Roots follow the soil either way: a compacted pan, a high water table or heavy clay stops them well short of any of it, and deep open ground lets them go further.
- Cats and dogs
- Confirmed safe
We say a plant is safe only where a named poison-control reference names that exact species and records it as non-toxic to both cats and dogs. Most plants are on nobody’s list, and their absence here is not a judgement about them. This is a record of what those references say, not veterinary advice, and it cannot account for your own animal, the quantity eaten, or a plant treated with anything.
The ASPCA row is our exact species and reads Non-Toxic to Dogs, Non-Toxic to Cats. It is also filed as Ribbon Plant, Anthericum and Spider Ivy. The Pet Poison Helpline carries no page for this plant.
- Scale insects Scale insects along the stems
- Vine weevil Vine weevil larvae down among the roots
- Root & crown rot Root rot in soil left waterlogged
- Brown leaf tips from the fluoride in tap water or too much feed; rainwater avoids the first
Beneficial predators that hunt this plant's pests — grow their favourite flowers nearby to recruit them. companion plant
- Beneficial nematodes Steinernema & Heterorhabditis spp.Hunts Vine weevil
Microscopic worms watered onto damp soil that hunt down soil-dwelling grubs and release a bacterium that kills them within days. Timing is the whole thing: warm, damp soil and a small target grub, which means late summer for most of what they are used against.
- Frogs & toads AnuraHunts Vine weevil
A resident toad works the beds every night for slugs, cutworms, and weevils. Recruit them with water — even a sunken basin pond — plus damp shade and an upturned-pot toad house; skip the slug pellets that poison their prey.
- Ground beetle CarabidaeHunts Vine weevil
Fast, glossy night hunters that patrol the soil surface for slugs, cutworms, and root-fly larvae. Give them daytime cover — thick perennial edges, stepping stones, a log — and skip the tillage that wrecks their burrows.
- Hedgehog Erinaceus europaeusHunts Vine weevil
A European animal, and worth saying so plainly: there are no hedgehogs in North America, and the ally that does the same night shift here is the toad, the opossum or the ground beetle. Where they do occur, cut a gap in the fence and skip the pellets.
- Hoverfly SyrphidaeHunts Scale insects
Bee-mimicking flies whose legless larvae graze aphid colonies clean while the adults pollinate. A ribbon of shallow, nectar-rich flowers kept in bloom all season recruits wave after wave of them.
- Ladybird (lady beetle) CoccinellidaeHunts Scale insects
The gardener’s favorite ally: adults and their alligator-shaped larvae each eat thousands of aphids, plus scale, mealybugs, and other soft-bodied sap-suckers. Grow flat, open flowers for the adults and never spray a colony that ladybird larvae are already working.
Houseplants, like this one.
The Cottage Garden Companion — the gardener's herbarium at cottagegardencompanion.com