Pothos — The Water Jars

Several pothos cuttings, rooting in plain water in glass jars on the shelf and at the window. Not rare, not for sale, and here because a pothos is the cheapest honest teacher in this hobby.

We are not going to give these cultivar names. Some leaves carry gold streaking, some carry solid cream blocks, and ‘Golden’, ‘Marble Queen’ and ‘Snow Queen’ are sold interchangeably, usually unlabelled, and vary hugely with light anyway. We also can’t tell you with confidence how many separate plants are in these jars versus how many are cuttings off the same vine — we didn’t write it down when we started, and we’re not going to reconstruct it from memory. This page will get more specific when we can actually back it up.

What the jars are good for is the thing we can see:

Roots grown in water are not the same as roots grown in substrate. They come out thinner and more brittle, with far less of the fine fuzz that does the actual drinking, because they never had to hunt for moisture. Move a long-rooted water plant into a pot and a portion of that root mass simply dies back while the plant builds the other kind. The plant looks like it has stalled. It hasn’t — it’s re-plumbing.

That is not a small footnote. It is very close to what we think went wrong with the speckled plant in the journal, on a plant we cared about a great deal more. How long the transition takes and how much root is lost, we don’t have numbers for — which is exactly why these are sitting in glass where the whole thing is visible from the start, rather than being discovered afterwards on something expensive.

On the variegation. White tissue doesn’t photosynthesise. A leaf that is half cream is running on roughly half the solar panel, and the plant pays for the look in growth rate. It also means the two failure modes point in opposite directions: too little light and a pothos quietly drops the variegation to feed itself, too much and the pale sections — which have no pigment to shed the excess — scorch first.

First photographed here on 2 August 2026. They had been in the jars for a while before that, and we didn’t record when.