What's Wrong with My Peace Lily?

Peace lily's broad, thin leaves have almost no water storage, so the plant collapses fast when the soil dries out. The dramatic droop is the species' built-in thirst signal. Water it and the leaves stand back up within an hour or two.

Peace lily's shallow rhizomatous roots suffocate quickly when the soil stays wet. Rotting roots stop absorbing moisture, so the plant droops even though the soil is soaked. Check whether the soil is wet before assuming thirst.

Peace lily is famously sensitive to fluoride and chlorine in tap water. Those minerals travel up through the transpiration stream and accumulate at the leaf tips, where water exits. The tip cells die first, leaving crisp brown points with a sharp yellow border.

Peace lily comes from warm, humid rainforest understory and wants 50%+ humidity indoors. In dry indoor air the thin leaf blades lose moisture faster than the shallow roots can replace it, and the tips are the first to go.

Peace lily's roots rot when kept continuously wet, and damaged roots stop delivering nutrients. The plant pulls them back from the oldest leaves first, so yellowing starts at the base of the clump and works its way up.

Peace Lilies naturally retire their oldest outer leaves as new ones push up from the center. If only one or two lower leaves turn yellow while the center keeps producing new growth, the plant is healthy.

Peace lily's white spathe is a modified leaf, not a true flower, and producing it takes more energy than the plant can generate in deep shade. The plant survives in low light but reserves that energy for leaves, not blooms. Bright indirect light is the threshold that tips it into flowering.

Peace lily evolved on the dim rainforest floor and its broad, dark leaves are built to absorb filtered light, not deflect direct sun. Strong light bleaches chlorophyll and kills cells in dry tan or papery patches where the sun hit hardest. The damage does not reverse.

Fine webbing on leaf undersides and along stems, plus pale stippling across the blade. Peace lily is a mite magnet when indoor air turns dry, and the broad dark leaves hide stipple damage until it spreads wide.

White cottony clumps tucked into leaf axils and at the base of petioles. Peace lily's dense clumping growth gives mealybugs plenty of shelter, so populations build up before you notice the sticky honeydew residue on the leaves below.