How to Propagate a Leafless Pothos Vine

I'm a huge Pothos fan and I have many varieties. Recently it was time to clean up some of my older Pothos vines as they were getting unmanageably long. They were also beginning to lose some of the old leaves closest to the soil, so the base was looking thin. I have a lot of experience propagating Pothos vines with leaves on them, but I wasn't so sure if it was possible to propagate a leafless Pothos vine. It turns out, you can! In this blog, I'll walk you through the steps I took.

Cutting Pothos Segments for Propagation

As I said earlier, I had three Pothos in need of a trim, a Golden Pothos, a Marble Queen Pothos, and a Neon Pothos. They were getting long and also starting to drop some old leaves so they were looking a bit bare at the base. The first thing I did was untangle all the vines and spread them out so I could see what I was working with. Any vine that was pretty bare towards the base I decided to cut leaving just one node above the soil. New stems will offshoot from those nodes and will sprout new leaves.

Many of the vines I trimmed were quite long, like over 10 feet. I further trimmed those vines into segments to propagate. I decided to cut leafless stems so they were three to four nodes long. I also did some leaved vines that I tried to keep around two and a half feet long.

Pothos Water Propagation

I decided to water propagate these Pothos cuttings because I wanted to be able to keep a closer eye on root development having never propagated a leafless Pothos before. For the vessel, I just used regular clear glassware that I had around the kitchen. I also wanted to keep the leafless stems separate from the longer-leaved vines that I was propagating. In total, I had six glasses of Pothos propagating, one glass of stems, and one glass of leaved vines for each of the three varieties of Pothos I trimmed.

I let the trimmings callous over for two days. I dipped the ends in rooting hormone, and then placed them in water. Roots will eventually grow out of the nodes, so make sure that your water is deep enough to cover at least one more ideally two nodes if possible. You also want to make sure you have placed the cuttings right side up. That's easier to tell when there are still leaves attached. However, you can typically look at a bare node and still tell which side the leaf came out on. If you have a hard time telling, use a paint marker or some other durable marker so you can tell which side is up for each cutting. The Pothos cuttings were placed in water on March 1st.

Progress Propagating a Leafless Pothos Vine

I changed the water in the glass once a week. I kept the glasses on a table about five feet from north and east facings windows, so they got a little light but not very intense. The first cutting to sprout a root was actually a leafless Marble Queen cutting after about five days. It was the first to root even compared to the leaved cuttings. I was kind of surprised by that. The Marble Queen cutting that did root first was very thick, it was an old climbing vine. I don't know if that had anything to do with it or not.

Note I used regular drinking glasses, which are perfectly fine. However, you'll see that my experiment lasted about two months. Some of you may want something nicer looking than drinking glasses. Also if you have fewer cuttings than me (one glass had over 30 cuttings), you may want smaller propagation glasses. They make really cute propagation stations now. If you are looking for one make sure you choose one where you can remove the glass because it's important to change the water throughout the process.

Counts of Leafless Pothos Propagation

I'm writing this a day shy of the eight-week mark and you can see the progress from the table above. Once most of the glasses had a decent amount of roots I put a drop of all purpose plant fertilizer in each glass on weeks five and seven. The great news is you can propagate leafless Pothos vines. The Golden Pothos did the worst with a 45 percent success rate where success is measured as growing roots. At least a majority of the successful Golden Pothos stems grew roots and leaves.

The Neon Pothos did much better with a 62 percent success rate. I'm not exactly sure why the Golden Pothos did worse than the other two. It was probably the most scraggly looking of the three, so maybe that was it.

The Marble Queen Pothos was the most successful showing a 67 percent success rate. One peculiar thing was that the Marble Queen leafless stems were the first to make roots, but the last to start leaves which I found interesting.

Can You Propagate Leafless Pothos

All in all, I think this was a great success! The vines and stems that have not rooted all seem to be in good shape so there may still be hope. At this point, I plan to pot them up. I'll include the ones that haven't rooted yet as well. If they don't root, they'll just dry out in the soil pretty quickly.

Finally, I didn't do specific counts for the longer vines that I propagated, because that's been covered very thoroughly by the rest of the internet. I do have some pictures though.

Share your propagation stories in the comments.