Striped Dracaena

Long strap leaves in a tight rosette, each one striped white down its length. It is a Dracaena. Which one, we haven’t settled — the white striping fits several of the fragrans cultivars sold as ‘White Jewel’, ‘Warneckii’ or ‘Lemon Lime’, and telling those apart from a young plant is not something we can do honestly from a photograph. It will stay labelled this way until we can do better.

It earns its place here for an unflattering reason: this is the plant our own pot tool warns you about.

When we audited the Pot Finder logic, the worst bug in it was a condition that quietly excluded dry-preferring plants from the overwatering warnings — which meant dracaenas, one of the most commonly drowned houseplants sold, were being handed a clean bill of health. Keeping one on the shelf is how we make sure that class of mistake stays visible instead of theoretical.

What it actually wants, as far as we’ve seen: less water than its size suggests, and a genuine dry-down between waterings rather than a schedule. The brown, papery leaf tips people get on these are usually not underwatering — they’re the salts and fluoride in ordinary tap water accumulating faster than the plant can cope with. Dracaenas are unusually sensitive to that, and it’s the one case where we’d argue the water source is worth changing before the care routine is.