My prayer plant was very full and bloomed all summer.I accidently left it in a room that isn't well heated and it died back a lot.The plant needed to be re-potted but now it's a lot smaller,i was wondering about going ahead & taking it out of it's pot,removing dead growth & old soil.Then potting it up in new soil and trimming the roots back. Can the Maranta 'beauty kim' take this treatment.I do this to other plants but i've found the prayer plant to be a lil' touchy.

Personally, I would not disturb the roots until spring.

Jelinda: I'd remove it from the current container to take a look at the roots and see if it's possibly root-bound. I'd think it would be fine to repot in fresh potting medium as long as you keep it in a bright, warm location indoors.

I've always had trouble keeping Maranta's and Calathea's alive for long but I have two Calathea plants that began looking ratty and I sat the pots beneath shrubbery in deep shade and they began to look really great! I need to check on them because we did have a couple of cold spells recently.

Deebie, i was planning on doing this when it warms up.We don't have much cold weather & there's about 2 months before it starts warming up. I am just starting to think about what all needs to be done when it does warm up!!


Lin, I have had this prayer plant about 3 or 4 years now and every winter it seems to go down hill but them i put it out in the spring and it really takes off every year.It should have been re-potted last spring!! I have noticed the roots that were growing outof the bottom of the pot don't seem as healthy as they did before the plant was left in the cold room.Some of the plant did die,i had to cut some stems back to the soil and when i re-pot they will have to be removed.I think i lost about half the plant.

Any advice or opinions about trimming roots when re-potting plants.

I find that my prayer plants like to be in smaller pots and Im adding pictures of mine and they are two yrs old that I know of . I took the smaller one off the other one and it did just fine . I have a neighbor who is a farmer and she gave me the bigger one off her plant that was at least ten yrs old and she told me that the plant likes to be root bound or pot bound should I say . anyways here are pics of mine . I never put them outside .

I am hoping it will bounce back and look good by the end of the summer this year.Now that i know for sure it likes to be pot bound, i am wondering if i should repot into a smaller pot since so much of it died back.I don't know though maybe i should wait to see if any of comes back this summer.
In the 1st. pictures i posted at the beginning of this thread you can see how well it does outside,it blooms every summer,it is even blooming now.I have heard stressing a plant can cause it to bloom?? Here's pictures of the differences in the plant from being inside and then going outside.

This is in March when it's starts to warm up & i put it out now & then on warm days that the sun is out.

This photo was taken to show the different types,mine is 'beauty kim' it has the other types of leaves in 1 plant.The red,green & leaves with white in them.A really cool looking prayer plant.

Here you can see by August it's grown and blooms constantly.If you look these plants up it will say the flowers are insignificant,but when the whole plant is cover with these little white blooms, with one on top of the other i think they are anything but insignificant.


Here's a photo by November and you can see it's no longer as full etc... Even though it was November we still have warm weather with spurts of cold weather and the plant out been out in the warm sun part of that day,if you look close you can see it's raining outside the window and the plants wet.


In january is when it was accidently left in an unheated room during a cold spell.


If you ever decide to try putting your plant(s) outside i just put mine under trees and water almost everyday.It's planted in almost straight peat(sphagnum) moss and with our high temps it dries quickly but it loves the humidity.I hang it where i also put my Hoya's & Rhipsalis'. Their under trees in a place that has leaves & pine straw on the ground so i get the ground good & wet hoping to raise the humidity coming from under the plants ( if that even makes sense or is possible)

P.S. sorry it has taken me so long to get back to this thread!!

I put literally hundreds of tropical plants either on the ground or hanging from branches of four large oak trees. Many are still small plants, and thus might be in 3-4" pocket trays (24, 30 or 36 compartments) or in 3-4" pots, and thus don't take up a lot of room. The plants I have under my oaks include orchids, bromeliads, tillandsias, staghorn ferns, and fiddle leaf ficus. There are more varieties, but those five families of plants are the bulk of what I have. All the areas around my oaks are mulched, and I use cypress mulch exclusively now. When you water your plants the ground (mulch) will naturally get the run-off, so that certainly will be good for your trees and for raising the humidity. Also, the trees will supply needed shade between the hours of 10:00 AM and 4:00 PM. For most tropical plants, mid-day sun is a real killer. Trees also "perspire" greatly during the hottest part of the day, and this alone will supply added cooling and humidity for those tropical plants.