How to Care for Variegated Plants

Variegation in plants indicates colour all year long in your garden. Variegated plants are best for almost every climate but thrive in bright sunlight. They demand a bit of extra care and love for an all-green plant. Here, you can know how to care for your variegated plants and make them look perfect.

Bright Light

The paler portions of your plant’s leaf contain less chlorophyll in them, which indicates that your plant can't photosynthesize as much as it can in your all-green plant. It means your variegated plants require areas with brighter sunlight. They can also do extremely well in partial shade as they can add a lighter colour to its mixed borders, a beautiful contrast to its dark green hedges and shrubs, ensuring they receive sufficient sunlight for part of the entire day. With very strong sunlight, a few hours would be enough.

Reversion

If you like growing your plants with different coloured leaves, you might have seen that sometimes they will develop a random branch or stem with all-green leaves. The plant’s leaves on that specific stem or branch haven’t got the yellow, white, or pink colouration that the entire plant has. This quality of the stem or branch to grow all-green leaves is known as the reversion.

What Is Going on With Your Variegated Plant?

Variegated plants sometimes grow from a single original all-green plant that naturally grows a colour-splashed stem, a beautiful display. Your rare plant usually needs to be grown vegetatively to keep that colour variegation. It indicates that we need to take cuttings or tissue material from that colour-splashed part to develop new plants. The plant often forgets that it's variegated and begins to thrive green stems. Your plant is reverting to the default state of all-green leaves. A partly green leaf is less efficient at photosynthesizing than an all-green one. That's why an all-green stem tends to grow more robust than a variegated one.

Things You Can Do About Your Reverted Stems

Random checking and pruning are worthwhile if you don't like your variegated plants to revert to an all-green one. When you notice all-green stems on your plants, follow them back to the main branch of your plant, and prune them neatly away.

You can keep these all-green stems on your plant, but as they thrive vigorously and strongly than your variegated plants, eventually, your plant will look mostly or even all-green. To keep a bright colour, snip out an all-green stem as it grows. Keep that in mind what type of variegated plant you've got. Few of them are all green, to begin with, when they're young and grow bright colours after they've developed for some time. Do not cut any green stem out of you've got one of these beautiful plants.

If your plants look variegated but not as clear as before, some brighter sunlight and a good feed should see that right. Cut out heavily dangling shrubs in the border to provide it with a bit more sunshine, or you can move your rare houseplants to a brighter area indoors.