Golden pothos metamorphosis

[Shule]

Did you know that houseplants such as the golden pothos and heartleaf philodendron tend to be in their juvenile form? Apparently, as the plants mature in the wild, the leaves get significantly larger and change shape (more than once); think enormous, potentially like elephant ears.

Once the leaves mature, can the plant ever revert back to its juvenile form, or do the new leaves keep growing the same even with rooted cuttings? Imagine the cuttings are potted and kept in the same conditions as a typical golden pothos houseplant in juvenile form.

[Nan6b]

So we're basically bonsai-ing them?

[Rockoe10]

I've noticed my Pothos leaves changed a couple times when grown in my Aquarium. The leaves have reverted back to their smaller size, but the color never went back to the variegated golden color. They are a grassy green now.

[PhilaGardener]

Many variegated plants occur because the population of cells at the shoot tip (the "meristem") consists of groups of cells, some of which have mutation(s) that affect pigmentation and others of which do not. As the plant grows, the relative numbers in each group can shift, and as the green cells predominate (in part because they grow better) the variegation can be lost.

You can help maintain the attractive variegation by removing such all green shoots as they occur, and you might be able to rescue it by pruning back the plant to older sections that were variegated and letting dormant lateral meristems in leaf axils grow out. If they retained mixed cell populations, you will find variegated shoots appearing again.

This is a different phenomenon than the juvenile/adult transition that [mention]Shule[/mention] brought up. Another example of that is English Ivy https://landscapeplants.oregonstate.edu ... dera-helix- it has a juvenile form that transitions to an adult one (which blooms) as the vines get older and typically start climbing up a tree trunk. In that case, the change is permanent and cuttings of the adult form retain those characteristics. I don't know if pothos and philodendron behave similarly but I suspect that is the case.