Why Is My Pothos Leggy? (And How To Fix It)

At some point your Pothos stopped looking like a plant and started looking like a length of string with occasional leaves attached.

It’s not dying. It’s not even unhealthy, necessarily. It’s doing exactly what a Pothos does when it isn’t getting what it wants, which is stretch off in search of it. Here’s what’s actually happening, why you can’t reverse it, and what you can do instead.

What “leggy” actually means

Leggy means there’s too much bare stem between the leaves.

The proper term is long internodal spacing. A node is the point on the stem where a leaf grows out of, and where roots will eventually emerge if you propagate it. The internode is the gap between one node and the next.

On a happy Pothos those gaps are short, so the leaves sit close together and overlap slightly, and the plant looks full. On a leggy Pothos the gaps stretch out to two, three, sometimes six inches of naked stem, and the same number of leaves is spread over three times the length of vine.

You haven’t lost leaves. They’ve just been spaced out like a badly planned dinner party.

There’s a second thing that makes leggy plants look worse than they are. Stems grown in low light are thinner and weaker as well as longer, so they struggle to hold up the weight of the leaves on the end. So your Pothos isn’t just sparse, it’s also drooping. Two problems, one cause.

Why your Pothos went leggy

It’s stretching for light

This is the answer about 90% of the time.

(let’s be honest, light is the root – pun intended – cause of 90% of ALL plant woes).

A Pothos in dim conditions does something quite reasonable: it assumes it’s in the wrong place, and it goes looking for a better one.

Producing stem is cheap. Producing a big healthy leaf is expensive.

So when the light is poor, the plant spends what little energy it has on covering ground rather than on foliage, in the hope of reaching somewhere brighter.

The long gaps between your leaves are a map of where your Pothos has been searching.

How Much Light Does A Pothos Need? (Stop Putting It In The Dark)

It’s trailing instead of climbing

Pothos are climbers. Trailing them off a shelf is a lovely look, and I’m not going to tell you to stop, but you should know you’re working against the plant’s instincts.

A vine heading downwards is being told it hasn’t found its tree yet, so it keeps stretching and keeps its leaves small. A vine heading upwards gets the opposite signal and responds with bigger leaves, closer together.

So if you want a trailing Pothos, you need to compensate with more light than a climbing one would need. Trailing plus a dim corner is the fastest route to legginess there is.

How To Train Pothos To Climb A Moss Pole

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

(I do have trailing Pothos, because I cba to look after moss poles and I think it looks nicer. My house/plant, my rules).

The old leaves dropped off and left a bare vine

This one catches new Pothos owners out constantly, and it looks alarming.

The vine gets long.

The oldest leaves, back near the base, gradually yellow and drop.

What you’re left with is several feet of completely bare stem with a cluster of leaves way out at the far end, like a palm tree designed by someone who’d only had one described to them.

Some leaf loss at the base is normal ageing. A lot of it, quickly, usually means the plant is under stress somewhere: roots that have been too wet, a spell of being too dry, or pests.

The important bit is this: those bare nodes will not reliably grow new leaves where they are. Pothos generally run one active growth point at a time, out at the tip, and they very rarely go back and refurnish stem they’ve already finished with. You can wait a year and get nothing.

That’s not a disaster, it just means the fix is mechanical rather than a matter of care. You cut the bare vine into sections and root them, or you air layer it before you cut. Both are straightforward, and both are covered properly in the propagation guides.

How To Propagate Pothos: Every Method Explained

Air Layering Pothos: A Step By Step Guide

Genetics, a bit

Some Pothos are naturally leggier than others.

Cultivars vary, and individual plants within a cultivar vary too, so you can have two plants in identical conditions where one is noticeably more spread out than the other.

The fertiliser thing, which isn’t true

You may run into the claim that fertiliser shortens internodal spacing.

I’ve seen a fairly big houseplant YouTuber make this exact claim, while also selling her own brand of fertiliser. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

Fertiliser is useful.

It’s on my list of things that speed a Pothos up.

But it does not tell a plant to space its leaves more closely together, because that decision isn’t a nutritional one, it’s a response to light. Feeding a Pothos in a dark corner gets you a well-nourished Pothos in a dark corner, still stretching.

If something claims to fix legginess and it isn’t light or a pair of scissors, be suspicious.

Do Pothos Need Fertiliser?

The bad news: you can’t undo it

Existing internodal spacing is permanent. That stem has finished growing, it has set at that length, and nothing you do will contract it.

I’d rather tell you that now than have you spend three months waiting for a plant to tidy itself up.

So there are actually two separate jobs here, and it helps to keep them apart in your head:

1. Stop it happening to new growth. This is a light job.
2. Deal with the leggy growth you’ve already got. This is a scissors job.

Do the first one on its own and you’ll have a plant with a nice bushy new section on the end of several feet of bare stem. Do the second on its own and you’ll grow the problem straight back. You want both.

How to fix a leggy Pothos

Job one: more light

Move it closer to a window, or get a grow light. That’s it, that’s the whole intervention.

A quick test before you go buying anything: hold your hand between the plant and the window in the middle of the day. Crisp shadow with defined edges means the light is fine. Vague grey smudge means it isn’t. You don’t need a light meter, you need somewhere brighter.

If you want your Pothos to trail, be more aggressive about this than you think you need to be. If it can climb instead, let it, and you’ll get bigger leaves and shorter gaps for free.

How To Make Your Pothos Grow Faster

Job two: chop and prop

Cut the leggy vine into sections, root them, and pot them back together.

This is the bit that does the actual visual work. You’re not repairing the old growth, you’re replacing it. Several rooted cuttings planted into one pot gives you multiple vines from day one, which is how a bushy Pothos is made. Nature doesn’t produce them, potting does.

You’ll sometimes get a bonus out of the parent plant too. Cutting a Pothos back hard leaves a big root system supporting far fewer leaves, and it occasionally responds by activating a second growth point. When it happens it’s a nice surprise. It isn’t reliable enough to plan around, so don’t prune expecting it.

How To Prune Pothos Without Killing It

How To Make Pothos Fuller and Bushier

Job two, gentler version: layering

If the idea of hacking your plant into pieces makes you nervous, there’s a lower-stakes option.

Take the leggy vine and lay it back across the surface of the soil, so the bare nodes are in contact with the compost. Pin them down with hairpins if they won’t stay put. The nodes root where they touch, while still attached to the parent plant, so nothing is at risk. Once they’ve rooted and started producing leaves, you can cut between them.

It’s slower than chopping, and you keep a living plant the entire time. Good option if you’ve never propagated anything before.

Which fix do you need?

Frequently asked questions