How To Propagate Pothos In Water

Water propagation is how most people make their first new Pothos.

It needs no equipment, costs nothing, and you get to watch the whole thing happen through the side of a glass, which is most of the appeal.

It’s also the fastest route to roots, provided you know the two things that speed it up. Both of those I found out by testing rather than by reading, and one of them contradicts advice you’ll see repeated everywhere.

What you need

A jar. Scissors.

You can buy propagation stations with little glass tubes on a wooden stand and they look lovely, but a Pothos cannot tell the difference between one of those and a jam jar.

Taking the cutting

Cut just above a node. The node is the faint line running round the stem where a leaf attaches, and it’s where the roots come from. No node, no plant, regardless of how healthy the leaf looks.

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Take a longer piece of stem than you think you need. This is the tip I wish someone had given me early on.

Pothos have a habit of pushing out new leaves below the water line. They cope with this far better than most plants, but it isn’t ideal, and if your cutting is short you’ll be forever hauling it out of the jar to trim off submerged leaves. Leave yourself a decent length of bare stem below the node and the problem mostly goes away.

You only need enough water to cover one node. Not the whole stem, not half the cutting. One submerged node is the entire requirement. Anything else underwater is just more material available to rot.

Tap water or nutrient water?

Tap water is completely fine. If your tap water is good enough for your plants, it’s good enough for your cuttings, and Pothos are not fussy.

But nutrient water is faster, and not by a small margin.

When I rooted a cutting ten different ways at once to see what was quickest, water with hydroponic fertiliser in it won by a distance. It wasn’t close, and it wasn’t a subtle difference. Any hydroponic nutrient will do the job. I use the General Hydroponics Flora series, roughly 1ml of each part in 250ml of water, though in practice I gave up measuring and started eyeballing it and the results were the same.

Two things worth reporting from that test.

Superthrive did nothing useful. It produced a growth point early, which looked promising, and then never grew roots at all. Months later, still no roots. It did something, just not the thing I wanted.

The roots came out of a different place. In nutrient water, the new roots emerged from the ends of the existing aerial roots. In every other method I tried, they came directly out of the node. I have no explanation for that, but it’s consistent enough that I’ve stopped being surprised by it.

How often to change the water

Here’s the bit that goes against the internet.

The standard advice is every few days, to replenish oxygen and stop bacterial slime building up. There’s also a fairly popular claim that changing it more often than every four days makes no difference and might even damage the developing roots.

I tested it. Three cuttings, same conditions: one changed daily, one weekly, one never touched.

The daily one rooted considerably faster. I saw the first sign of rooting at about four days, which is quick by any standard. The other two were nowhere near.

So no, frequent changes don’t damage anything, and yes, it makes a real difference.

Am I going to change my propagation water every single day? Almost certainly not. I know myself. But it’s worth knowing that the option exists, because if you ever need a cutting rooted in a hurry, that’s the lever.

Practical version: change it as often as you can be bothered to. Every day if you’re motivated, every few days if you’re normal, once a week if you’re me in November. More is better, and there’s no point at which more becomes worse.

If you want to stack the two findings, nutrient water changed daily should be the fastest possible combination. I keep meaning to test it properly.

What rooting actually looks like

You’re not waiting for roots to appear from nowhere. You’re waiting for something that’s already there to wake up.

Watch the aerial root, the small brown nub beside the node. The first sign is the very tip of it turning pale or whitish. That’s the beginning, and it happens days before anything looks like a root.

After that it extends fairly quickly, and once you have one root the rest tend to follow.

Pothos Aerial Roots: What Are They and What Do You Do With Them?

When to pot it up

I wait until the roots start branching, because a branched root system transitions into soil more comfortably. But Pothos are relaxed about this and an inch of root is enough if you’re impatient.

The move into soil is the part that trips people up, because water roots and soil roots are structurally different and a proportion of the water roots will die back. Two ways to make that easier:

Use a very chunky mix. Lots of bark and perlite, plenty of air, closer to the wet-but-oxygenated conditions the roots have been living in.

Or use a normal mix and a cloche. Water it, squeeze it out so it’s damp rather than wet, pot the cutting, then keep the whole thing under a cloche or in a clear box for a few weeks until you see new growth. The high humidity means the cutting isn’t losing water through its leaves while its root system rebuilds.

Once there’s new growth, it’s fine.

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The myth about leaving it in water too long

You’ll read that if a cutting stays in water beyond some point, it can never go back to soil.

This isn’t a thing. You can move a Pothos between water and soil whenever you like, in either direction, at any stage. There is no window that closes.

What’s true is that switching media is stressful, and a plant that’s been in water for a year has a root system entirely adapted to water, so the transition is a bigger adjustment than it would have been at three weeks. Expect some leaf loss. Expect it to sulk. Don’t expect it to be impossible, because it isn’t.

Or don’t pot it up at all

A Pothos cutting in a jar of water is not an unfinished project. It’s a valid way to keep the plant permanently, and plenty of people do exactly that.

If you go that route, top the water up as it evaporates, change it when it looks murky, and add a weak nutrient solution occasionally, because plain water contains nothing for the plant to eat. It’ll grow more slowly than one in soil, but it’ll live for years.

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Frequently asked questions