Your cutting is sitting there. It looks fine. It has looked fine, unchanged, for what feels like a very long time, and you’re starting to suspect nothing is ever going to happen.
Before we go through the possible causes, let’s answer the question underneath the question.
Is it actually dead?
Squeeze the stem. If it’s firm and green, it’s alive.
That’s the whole test. Not how long it’s been, not whether you can see roots, not whether the leaf looks a bit tired. Firm and green means the cutting is intact and still capable of rooting.
Soft, mushy, hollow, shrivelled or brown means it’s gone, and no amount of waiting will change that.
This matters because it separates two completely different situations that feel identical from the outside. A cutting doing nothing for six weeks and a cutting that died in week two look the same in a jar. The squeeze test tells you which one you’ve got, and it takes two seconds.
If it passes the test, there’s no deadline. A firm green Pothos cutting is not failing, it’s just slower than you’d like. Keep going.
The most likely answer: it’s been nine days
Rooting takes a couple of weeks at minimum, often longer, and there’s a period at the start where absolutely nothing visible happens because the work is going on inside the stem. The plant is not idle, it’s just not showing you anything yet.
The first visible sign isn’t a root. It’s the very tip of the aerial root nub beside the node turning pale or whitish. That’s days before anything root-shaped appears.
How Long Does Pothos Propagation Take?
If it’s been under a fortnight, the answer is almost certainly patience. If it’s been longer, work through the list below.
Check there’s actually a node
Worth ruling out first, because if this is the problem nothing else you do will help.
A Pothos cutting needs a node. That’s the faint line running round the stem where a leaf attaches, and it’s where roots come from. A cutting made of leaf and petiole with no stem section will never root, no matter how healthy it looks.
Confusingly, a leaf on its own can produce roots and then sit there permanently without ever growing. If your cutting has roots but has done nothing else for months, this is probably what happened.
How To Propagate Pothos: Every Method Explained
It’s too cold
Warmth matters more than light for rooting, which catches a lot of people out.
A cutting on a windowsill in January is in a cold draught for a good part of the day, and cold slows everything to a crawl. It won’t kill the cutting, it’ll just extend the timeline to the point where you assume it’s failed.
Move it somewhere warmer. A heat mat underneath makes a bigger difference than almost anything else you could do.
What Temperature Do Pothos Need?
The water has gone stagnant
If you’re propagating in water and it’s cloudy, slimy or smells, that’s bacterial growth, and it slows rooting down considerably.
Rinse the cutting under the tap, wash the jar out properly, refill with fresh water. Then change it more often than you have been.
Frequent water changes make a real difference here. When I tested cuttings with the water changed daily against ones changed rarely, the daily one rooted dramatically faster. You don’t have to go that far, but as often as you can manage is the right target.
How To Propagate Pothos In Water
There isn’t enough humidity
A cutting has no roots. It cannot replace water it loses through its leaves, so in dry air it spends its energy on staying hydrated rather than on rooting.
This is the quiet cause. Nothing looks wrong, the cutting just stalls.
The fix is a lid. A clear box, a cloche, even a clear plastic bag over the top. High humidity means the cutting stops losing water and can put its resources where you want them.
How To Propagate Pothos In Soil
It’s rotting
Soft, brown or mushy at the cut end, often with the discolouration creeping upwards.
The fix is to recut above the rot and carry on. Take a clean, sharp blade, cut back into firm green tissue, and put it back. You haven’t lost the cutting unless the rot has reached the node.
Then deal with the cause: usually submerged leaves breaking down in the water, stagnant water, or substrate that’s wet rather than damp. Trim off anything below the water line, freshen everything up, and it’ll be fine.
Pests
Cuttings are stressed plants, and stressed plants attract pests. It’s an unfair arrangement but a consistent one.
Have a proper look at the leaf undersides and where the petiole meets the stem. Thrips especially like soft new growth and a cutting is nothing but soft new growth.
The fix is simple: rinse the cutting off whenever you change the water. That alone deals with most of it at this scale, and you don’t need to reach for anything stronger on something this small.
Common Pothos Pests: How To Identify and Destroy Them
Should you feed a struggling cutting?
There’s widespread advice that you should never feed a stressed plant, and plenty of people report that doing so made things worse.
I’ll be straight with you: I’ve not found that. I’ve fed a lot of struggling cuttings and it has never done any harm.
More to the point, the fastest rooting result I’ve ever recorded came from nutrient water, and a cutting with no roots at all is about as stressed as a plant gets. If feeding stressed plants were reliably harmful, that experiment should have gone badly. It went better than everything else.
So my position: it won’t rescue a cutting that’s too cold, too dry or rotting, because those are environmental problems and nutrition doesn’t fix them. But it isn’t the risk it’s made out to be, and in water propagation specifically it’s the single easiest way to speed things up.
Fertiliser is a multivitamin. It won’t feed a starving person. It also won’t harm one.
The fix that solves most of this at once
If you’ve read the last several sections and thought “it could be a few of those,” you’re probably right, and there’s one change that addresses cold, dry air and inconsistency simultaneously.
Put the cutting in a clear box with damp moss or soil in the bottom, lid on, somewhere bright and warm.
Humidity solved. Temperature stabilised. No water to go stagnant. Nothing to remember. It’s what I use by default, and it’s what I’d move a stalled cutting into rather than continuing to fiddle with a jar.
How To Propagate Pothos In Soil
Frequently asked questions
How long before I should worry about a Pothos cutting?
Judge it by firmness rather than time. A stem that’s still firm and green is still viable, however long it’s been sitting there. A soft or shrivelled one is finished regardless of how recently you took it.
My cutting has roots but no new leaves. What’s wrong?
Usually nothing, roots come first and leaves follow. If it’s been months with roots and no growth, check the cutting actually has a node rather than being a leaf that rooted.
Should I cut the aerial root off before propagating?
No. Leave it. Cuttings with an aerial root tend to root faster, and in nutrient water the new roots often emerge straight out of the existing aerial root.
Can I add rooting hormone to fix a slow cutting?
You can, but it’s rarely the problem with Pothos. Warmth and humidity will do more.
Is it worth starting again with a fresh cutting?
Only if the current one has failed the firmness test. Pothos cost you nothing to propagate, so taking a couple of extra cuttings as insurance is sensible, but don’t bin a firm green one out of impatience.
Do cuttings root more slowly in winter?
Yes, noticeably, and it’s mostly temperature rather than light. A warm spot or a heat mat closes most of the gap.
My cutting rotted. Did I do something wrong?
Usually a leaf left below the water line, water that wasn’t changed, or substrate that was wet rather than damp. Recut above the rot, fix whichever of those it was, and carry on.