Calathea care: light, soft water and brown leaf edges
This plant wants shade rather than sun and soft water rather than what comes out of the tap, and the brown edges everyone complains about come from the water and the air rather than from neglect. This page settles how hard it really is, which one you have, where it lives and whether the cat can chew it.
- Bright shade, never direct sun. The painted pattern washes out at both extremes.
- Keep the compost evenly moist, and use rainwater, filtered water or stood tap water.
- Safe around cats and dogs, on the ASPCA listing.
What a calathea plant is, and why its leaves move
A calathea plant is a clump-forming tropical perennial grown for the markings on its leaves, which rise on thin stalks straight out of the soil. It grows on the floor of a rainforest under a canopy, and that one fact explains every instruction further down this page: the light there is filtered, the air is humid, and the ground neither dries out nor floods. The RHS puts the group at 20 to 100 cm tall.
Most calathea plants have been renamed into three genera, Ctenanthe, Goeppertia and Stromanthe, and the RHS advises looking for the label that still says calathea when you buy one. Both names point at the same plant. In the evening the leaves fold upright and open again at sunrise, a movement called nyctinasty that runs on light and temperature rather than on anything you do, and it is shared with the prayer plant, the closest relative you are likely to own.
Are calatheas as hard as people say
Mostly yes, and the difficulty is specific rather than general. NC State says outright that the rattlesnake plant is difficult to care for because of its humidity requirements, and that is the honest summary for the group. How to care for calathea is undemanding on feeding, pruning and repotting. Two things are not.
Those two are the water you use and the air in the room. Tap water is the cheap one to fix, because rainwater, a filter jug or tap water left standing costs nothing to arrange. Dry air is the expensive one, because a radiator under a windowsill undoes a humidity tray every winter and the real fixes are a different room or a humidifier. Buy one if you have a kitchen or a bathroom with a window. Buy something easier first if the only free spot in the house is above a radiator.
Calathea types and which one to start with
What separates the calathea varieties for a buyer is not how the leaf is painted, it is how much humidity each one demands. The showiest markings sit on the fussiest plants, and the plainly striped ones are the ones that survive an ordinary room.
Start with the rattlesnake or the calathea rufibarba, because both tolerate a normal room while you learn what your water and your radiators do. Leave the orbifolia and the peacock until a fern has come through a winter with you. Buy a white fusion only for a spot you have already tested with something else, because it carries the least chlorophyll of the group and has the least margin. Only the crocata is bought for its flower, and an orange calathea flower is the exception in a group grown entirely for leaves. The plant care guide has the light and water for every other plant on the site.
| Variety | Leaf | How demanding | Suits a pocket? |
|---|
| Calathea orbifolia | Large round leaves with broad silver-green banding | High, and it shows dry air first | No, the leaves get too large |
| Calathea makoyana, the peacock | Oval, cream ground with dark feathering, purple underside | High | Only while young |
| Calathea ornata, the pinstripe | Dark green with fine pink or white pinstripes | High | Only while young |
| Calathea roseopicta, rose painted, and Dottie | Round, dark, with a pink or cream ring inside the margin | Medium to high | Yes |
| Calathea medallion | Round, deep green with a pale halo and a burgundy underside | Medium to high | Yes |
| Calathea lancifolia, the rattlesnake | Long wavy leaves, alternating large and small dark spots | Medium, the most forgiving here | Yes |
| Calathea rufibarba, the furry feather | Plain green, wavy edged, velvet-textured underside | Medium | Yes |
| Calathea zebrina | Velvet leaf with pale stripes running out to the edge | Medium to high | Yes |
| Calathea white fusion | Irregular white variegation, the least chlorophyll of the group | Very high, for a tested spot only | No |
| Calathea musaica, the network | A fine pale grid across a plain green leaf | Medium to high | Yes |
| Calathea vittata | Narrow leaf with fine white lines, upright habit | Medium | Yes |
| Calathea warscewiczii | Velvet dark green, burgundy underside, cream flower spikes | High, and it gets large | No |
Where to put a calathea in a room
Calathea light requirements come down to a position rather than a category: a metre or two back from a window that does not get direct sun, facing the glass rather than beside it. A care label gives you the category and leaves you to guess at the spot, which is the part that decides whether the plant lives.
Test the spot before you commit the plant to it. At the brightest hour of the day, hold your hand where the leaves will sit. A soft-edged shadow is right, a sharp-edged one is too much light, and no shadow at all is too little. The RHS moves the plant onto a south-facing sill for the winter and back off it in summer, which is the same test run twice a year. For a room that fails it outright, low light houseplants covers what will live there instead.
Both ends of the range leave a sign. Too much light and the painted pattern washes out toward plain green, with leaf burn at the far end of it. Too little and the new leaves come in smaller than the ones they replace. Keep it off the top of a radiator and out of a draught, because NC State names cold draughts and inconsistent temperature alongside direct sun on the list this plant will not tolerate. Outdoors works only in a sheltered shaded spot through the warm months, and it ends the night the temperature drops toward the low teens. A Peace lily takes the same shaded corner if you want a second plant that asks for less.
Watering a calathea, and which water to use
Water when the top of the compost feels dry and the pot has stopped feeling heavy, keeping it evenly moist rather than letting it swing between soaked and bone dry. Missouri Botanical Garden puts this whole family in the group that likes evenly moist soil that does not dry out, and lists light, temperature, vents and distance from the window as what sets how fast a pot dries. That is why a fixed interval fails: the same plant in a bright warm room drinks faster than the same plant three metres back.
The water matters more here than on almost any other houseplant. NC State recommends distilled or rainwater because the fluoride in tap water causes the leaves to brown, and the RHS names lime and chlorine in mains water as the same kind of problem. The cheapest fix is a jug left standing overnight, which lets the chlorine go, followed by a filter jug, followed by collecting rainwater. Water that has come through a domestic softener is the one to avoid, because softening swaps hardness for sodium.
Watering from below helps when the compost has pulled away from the side of the pot and the water runs straight down the gap. Stand the pot in a few centimetres of water for twenty minutes, then take it out and let it drain. It does not help as a routine, because the salts you are trying to keep out of the leaves end up concentrating at the top of the pot. Whatever you do, tip away whatever collects in the cover pot: roots left standing in water rot, and that is the fastest way to lose one.
Humidity and brown edges on calathea leaves
Brown edges come from two different causes and the fix is different for each. Dry air burns the thinnest tissue on the leaf, which is the rim, and it leaves a narrow even brown line all the way round with a fine yellow band inside it. Water quality leaves brown in patches and at the tips rather than as an even line, and it builds slowly on the oldest leaves first. If every leaf on the plant has the same neat brown rim, treat the air. If the oldest leaves are far worse than the new ones, change the water first. A Boston fern standing in the same room tells you which you have, because it browns from dry air weeks before this plant does.
- A gravel tray. Put the pot on a wide tray of damp gravel with the water level below the pot base. It raises the humidity in the few centimetres around the plant, which is the part that matters, and it is what both the RHS and NC State recommend.
- Grouping plants. Stand three or four plants together so the moisture they transpire stays between them. Free, and it works about as well as a tray.
- Moving the plant. A kitchen or a bathroom with a window is more humid than the rest of the house all year. This is the fix that actually holds through a winter.
- A humidifier. The only one that changes the reading in a dry room. NC State puts the peacock plant at 60 per cent relative humidity to thrive, and nothing on the list above reaches that in a heated flat.
Soil, feeding and when to repot a calathea
The compost has to hold moisture without going airless, which is why a bag of multipurpose on its own is wrong for this plant. The RHS mixes about a tenth potting grit into peat-free multipurpose compost. Bark keeps channels open so the roots get air, coir and compost hold the water between waterings, and the grit or perlite stops the whole thing settling into a block after a year. Feed once a month from April to September with a balanced houseplant fertiliser and stop entirely from October, because feeding a plant that is not growing leaves salts in the pot and those show up as the same brown edge hard water gives you.
Repot every few years, in spring or summer, once the clump has filled the pot. Go up one or two sizes and no more, since a pot too large stays wet in the middle where there are no roots. The one thing worth doing at the same time is mixing a slow-release fertiliser into the new compost, which the RHS says covers the feeding for the first year. A Maidenhair fern wants the same open moisture-holding mix if you are making up a batch. The per-variety care questions all resolve here: an ornata, a makoyana and a rufibarba want the same compost, the same feed and the same repotting, and differ only in how much humidity they demand.
Is a calathea safe for cats and dogs
No, and that is the answer people come for. Calathea is not toxic to cats, and the ASPCA lists the genus as non-toxic to cats, dogs and horses, which makes it calathea safe for cats in the sense the question is usually asked, and very few patterned houseplants can say the same.
Non-toxic is not the same as harmless in quantity. A cat that eats a quantity of any plant material vomits, and the vet visit is about the volume rather than the species. The practical cost is to the plant rather than to the animal: a chewed leaf never heals, the bite mark stays as a brown edge for the life of that leaf, and a cat that has decided the long wavy leaves are worth batting will strip the lower ones. That is worth knowing before you hang one at cat height.
A calathea on the wall
This is not the plant to start a wall with. A pocket sits proud of the wall with air moving on every side of it, which dries the substrate from more directions than a pot on a shelf, and this is the plant that reads dry air before anything else in the house. Everything that makes a wall pocket good for a pothos works against this one.
Two conditions make it work. The room has to be one of the humid ones, a kitchen or a bathroom with a window, and the variety has to be one of the smaller tolerant ones rather than an orbifolia. Put something beside it that shares the conditions and buffers the air, a fern or a maranta rather than a succulent, and accept that this is the plant on the board you will be checking.
The pocket holds 1.8 litres of substrate. The board hangs from one hinge on one wall hook, so the wall side is one screw, one plug and one drilled hole. Treat the filled weight like a heavy framed picture rather than a poster: plasterboard takes an expanding plug, brick a standard one, and a tiled wall needs a tile bit before the masonry bit. Hang it at eye level or a little above, where you will notice a curled leaf the same day.
- Take a young plant of a tolerant variety out of its pot.
- Loosen the root ball with your fingers until it fits the pocket.
- Sit it in, fill around it with an open moisture-holding mix and press lightly.
- Water slowly, in measured amounts, with soft water, until the substrate is evenly damp.
Calathea problems and how to fix them
| What you see | Why | The fix |
|---|
| Brown, crisp edges all round the leaf | Dry air, or minerals from hard tap water | Move it somewhere humid and switch to rainwater or filtered water. |
| Leaves curled inward along the midrib | The compost has gone too dry, or the air has | Water it and check again in an hour. If it stays curled, treat the air. |
| Leaves flat on the pot by evening | Normal. The leaves fold up at night and down by day | Nothing. Check again in the morning before you change anything. |
| Washed-out or faded pattern | Too much light, and at the far end direct sun | Move it back from the window until the shadow test comes out soft. |
| Dry patches in the middle of the leaf | Water sitting on the leaf, or scorch from a sun beam | Water the compost rather than the foliage and keep it out of any beam. |
| Yellow leaves | Usually compost that has stayed too wet | Let the top dry, tip out the cover pot and check the roots are firm. |
How to propagate a calathea by division
Division is the only method that works, and the RHS gives it as the one to use. A leaf cutting has no growing point on it and will never make a plant. A stem in a jar of water rots, because what looks like a stem is a leaf stalk. You are splitting a clump that has already made several growing points of its own, so the plant has to be big enough to divide before you start.
- Divide in spring, once the clump has filled its pot and new leaves are coming.
- Water the plant the day before so the root ball slides out whole.
- Tip it out and tease the roots apart into sections, each with several leaves and its own roots.
- Pot each section into fresh open compost at the depth it sat at before, and water it in with soft water.
- Keep every division warm, humid and evenly moist, under a clear bag for the first fortnight if the room is dry.
Give it two weeks. A division that has taken puts up one new rolled leaf from the centre, and that is the signal to take the bag off and treat it as a plant. One that does nothing but hold the leaves it already had is still working on roots, so leave it alone and keep the compost evenly damp.
How do you pronounce calathea?
Kal-uh-THEE-uh, with the stress on the third syllable. The botanical name that replaced it, Goeppertia, is ghep-PER-tee-ah, which NC State gives on its own plant pages.
Is a calathea the same as a prayer plant?
They are close relatives in the same family and both fold their leaves at night, but a maranta grows low and spreading while a calathea sends its leaves up on tall stalks from a clump. In a shop, look at whether the leaves trail sideways over the pot rim or stand up out of it. The maranta is the easier of the two by a distance.
Will a calathea recover once every leaf has crisped?
It can, as long as the roots and the growing points at soil level are still firm and pale rather than soft and brown. Cut the dead leaves off at the base, fix the water and the humidity first, and wait. New leaves come from the centre of the clump, so nothing you see on the old foliage tells you whether it worked.
Can you root a calathea in water?
No. What looks like a stem is a leaf stalk with no growing point on it, so it takes up water for a few weeks, makes no roots and then rots. Division is the only method that works on this plant.
Do calatheas clean the air?
No, not measurably in a real room. The studies people cite were done in sealed chambers, and the air exchange in an ordinary house swamps anything a potted plant does. What it gives you instead is a leaf pattern no artificial plant reproduces and a safe plant to keep around animals.
Can a calathea live in a bathroom?
Yes, if the bathroom has a window. The humidity is the best in the house and it is exactly what this plant is short of everywhere else. A windowless bathroom is a different question, because the shower does nothing about the light.
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