Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) is the best beginner plant because they are so tough that its leaves can even stay green during an extended period of darkness (This is why it is colloquially known as Devil’s Ivy).
I have actually spent decades saving pothos for friends and family, and whilst they can tolerate and survive certain conditions, I am going to show you how to care for it in a way that it becomes a prize-winning beauty!
Here is your guide to pothos care in a way that you understand how pothos grows in the wild, in order for us to get the bushiest, healthiest pothos that you can get indoors with lovely big leaves.
1. Potting Soil for Pothos (The Most Important piece of the puzzle)
Most of the generic care guides that I read online just say to use “well-draining soil,” which is too vague and lacks the specificity that gets our pothos big and healthy whilst avoiding yellow leaves. For our pothos, we need to think just as much about oxygen reaching the roots as about excess water draining away.
The “Epiphyte” Factor
We need to know how pothos grows in the wild to truly undertsand how to grow them in our homes…
In their native tropical environment, Pothos are what’s called ‘hemiepiphytes’. Whilst this sounds botanically technical, all it means is that they spend the first part of their lives with their roots in the soil on the forest floor, and as they mature, they climb trees like ivy to look for more light and to deal with less competition on the forest floor.
Therefore, their roots are adapted to growing in humid, airy circumstances rather than living in a thick, soggy peat bog (I reference peat bogs as a lot of houseplant soil is composed of peat mined from bogs that have been drained).
My Signature Pothos potting Mix: I actuall uuse this on most houseplants because it is so effective (and most houseplants are tropical like our pothos). After years of trial and error with different soil amendments to see what works best, I figured out what works best.
I found the following 2:1 ratio works best: 2 parts potting soil (ideally one that doesn’t contain peat)) and 1 part pine bark chippings (which is essentially an orchid bark potting mix).
Why the bark and why does this work so well? Adding pine bark is the most important care step for your pothos for the following reasons… It creates pore spaces due to its large size that replicate the soil structure on the forest floor.
In my home experiments that I conduucted to come to this conclusion, the Pothos in tmy pine bark soil amendement grow nearly 30% faster (i meatured the length of the vines, but the leaves were also bigger) because the roots can respire properly which is crictical for growth and health of your pothos.
It also helped to mitigate the most common ailments of pothos which is yellow leaves. The yellowing of leaves occours because of dense potting soil and ddue to too much water. With the bark potting soil you can be really heavy handed with the watering can and due to the superior drainage and optical balaance of moisture your pothos is still healthy.
2. Light for Perfect pothos Growth and bigger leaves
I am sure that you’ve heard that pothos thrives in lower light, as marketed online or on the care instructions that come with store-bought pothos.
Whilst pothos can tolerate low light, they won’t thrive. and they can even lose their variegation and grow fewer leaves that are smaller in size…
How to Achieve the optimal balance of light…
Think of it this way, pothos in the wild spend years growing and climbing trees for more light…They are not content in dim conditions.
So what do pothos want in our homes? Bright, indirect light, rather than full sun (which scorches).
If you want pothos that is bushy with big leaves and even possibly holes in the leaves (like monstera), then I would locate your pothos in a bright bathroom with a frosted window to diffuse the light, use a sheer curtain (which also diffuses the light) in front of a south facing window or if you have a room that is south facing (whuch has direct sunlight) but you can find a corner that doesn’t get the direct sunlight this is often best.
3. Watering Your pothos Look out for Guttation
So it’s tricky to give generic watering advice because your home in say southern california is different from someone’s apartment in New York. Different climate, temperature, humidity, light intensity, hours of sun etc.
But to give you a frame of reference, I water my pothos once a week in Spring and Summer, once every 10 days in Fall and once every 2 weeks in Winter.
However, more reliable is simply picking up your pot. The goal with watering should always be to give your plant a good soak so that the potting soil is evenly moist. The pot should feel reassuringly heavy after watering. Pick it up and assess the weight.
We want around the first inch or two of the soil to dry before watering again, which means that it should feel noticeably lighter after, say, a week. If the pot feels lighter than you were expecting, then the soil has probably dried out too much, and you need to give it a good soak.
Expert Insights: What is your pothos crying or sweating?
Have you ever noticed a few droplets of water that form on pothos leaves, usually after watering? This isn’t actually water but a substance called xylem due to a process called guttation.
The Lesson: What’s happening here is your plant is essentially sweating out excess moisture (and sometimes nutrients because the soil is too damp, which may be from watering, but it could be that the soil is too dense and holding onto too much water.
You can either assess whether you are overwatering (are you watering more than once a week?) or look at the soil…This is why I love pine bark as a soil amendment so much! It allows excess water to drain away and largely avoid any guttation. Don’t worry if it happens now and again, however, it can be a normal process.
4. Do you want your pothos to be bushy? The Bushy Strategy: Pruning and Layering
So to get that perfect bushy look that you see on social media for your pothos, I want you to think less like a plant parent and more like a botanical architect.
The Paperclip hack
All too often, you see pothos growing long vines, and the centre of the plant looks a bit sparse and sad. What we need to do is take one of the long vines and coil it around the inner rim of the pot, and use the paper clip to pin a node (the little bumpy brown bit on the vine) directly against the soil, making sure there is good contact.
Pothos nodes are sort of programmed to root upon contact with a surface (when they are climbing in the wild). This node then sends roots to grow into the soil, and once it feels anchored, it’ll often activate a new growth point, so instead of say, one vine, you may have 3 emerging from one place, making it look oh so bushy!
Another bushy tip!
If you want to propagate less leggy pothos, you can take cuttings and root them in water. Once the roots are 1 inch, you can transfer them back to the mother pot to create the effect of a bushier plant.
Propagating is quite a visual process, so here’s a YouTube video showing you exactly what to do…
5. Vertical Growth vs. Horizontal Growth…How to get big, mature leaves
As we discussed in our growth article, our Pothos plants undergo morphological maturation when they climb vertically as opposed to cascading down.
- Trailing pothos vines: This is the pothos essentially staying in a juvenile state. This is why the Leaves stay small and heart-shaped as opposed to big and beautiful.
- Climbing pothos vines with bigger leaves: The plant senses stability through a process botanists call thigmotropism. When it climbs upwards, it thinks it has found a tree, so it directs its energy into thicker vines and larger leaves. The prize of climbing in the wild is, of course, more light and less competition for space.
My Tip: If you want a showstopping pothos, you need to get a moist moss or coconut coir pole. This essentially replicates a tree trunk. Once the vines and aerial roots start climbing the mossy pole and go upwards, they direct their energy from searching to expand. Essentially replicating its preferred conditions in its native habitat.
6. Troubleshooting Common problems
| Symptoms | The Botanical reason | How to fix it |
| Yellow Leaves (Lower) | Lack of Root respiration / Overwatering | Switch to 2:1 Soil-to-Bark Mix. |
| Pale, Small Leaves | Light Starvation | Perform the Shadow Test; move to a brighter spot. |
| Brown, Crispy Edges | Low Humidity / Fertilizer Burn | Mist the plant or use half-strength fertilizer. |
| Variegated leaves turning solid green | Reverting (trying to find more light) | Increase light to encourage color production. |
| Sweating leaf tips (Guttation) | Positive root pressure (too much water) | Increase time between waterings. |
7. Fertilizer
Pothos are not heavy feeders, but to keep growth up, some fertilizer is a good idea.
What works the best for me…I use a balanced liquid ordinary houseplant fertilizer but I always dilute it to just half-strength as full strength can cause the tips to turn brown on pothos.
Fertilize it every month from March to mid July (any longer and you risk the accumulation of salts, and the pothos doesn’t grow as much in winter).
My Final Thoughts on Pothos Care
If you give your pothos aerated soil with pine bark, a climbing support in the form of a moss pole, and some well-calculated pruning, it is going to be less of a vine and more of an architectural masterpiece!