Prayer Plant: dry air and tap water — what does it look like?

Crisp brown edges and tips, leaves curling lengthwise, color fading. Filtered or rainwater plus genuine humidity. Damaged leaves will not recover; watch new growth.

Prayer Plant: cold drafts — what does it look like?

Sudden yellowing and leaf drop on the side nearest a door or window. Tropical understory plant. Below about 60°F it deteriorates quickly.

Prayer Plant: root rot — what does it look like?

Stems mushy at soil level, leaves yellowing wholesale, soil sour. Humidity belongs in the air, not the pot. This is the classic over-correction.

Field Guide/Prayer Plant

What went wrong

Prayer Plant

Maranta leuconeura

Folds its leaves at night. Stops folding when things are wrong.

Maranta shares Calathea's dislike of tap water and dry air but is somewhat more forgiving, which paradoxically means it is often kept alive in poor conditions long enough to look thoroughly bad before it dies.

Its useful feature is the nightly leaf-folding. A prayer plant that has stopped raising its leaves in the evening is telling you something is wrong well before the browning starts — it is the earliest warning signal any common houseplant gives.

Usually one of these

3 Likely Causes

Ranked by how often it is actually this.

01
Dry air and tap water
Most common
What you saw
Crisp brown edges and tips, leaves curling lengthwise, color fading.
What it means
Filtered or rainwater plus genuine humidity. Damaged leaves will not recover; watch new growth.
02
Cold drafts
Winter
What you saw
Sudden yellowing and leaf drop on the side nearest a door or window.
What it means
Tropical understory plant. Below about 60°F it deteriorates quickly.
03
Root rot
Common when humidity is chased with water
What you saw
Stems mushy at soil level, leaves yellowing wholesale, soil sour.
What it means
Humidity belongs in the air, not the pot. This is the classic over-correction.

The question you actually have

Dead or dormant?

Watch it at night. Leaves that still rise after dark mean a living, functioning plant no matter how brown the edges are. If the foliage is entirely gone, check for firm rhizomes and pale root tips at the base — maranta regularly resprouts from the roots in spring after appearing completely dead.

If it did not make it