Rubber Plant: overwatering and root rot — what does it look like?

Lower leaves yellowing and dropping while upper leaves still look fine. Soil wet a week after watering. Stem soft near the base. Let it dry substantially between waterings. Check the base of the trunk for firmness.

Rubber Plant: cold draft leaf drop — what does it look like?

Sudden loss of several leaves with no yellowing, usually after cold weather or a door left open. Shock rather than disease. Move it away from the draft and leave it alone.

Rubber Plant: insufficient light — what does it look like?

Leggy growth with large gaps between leaves, small new leaves, loss of variegation. Rarely fatal directly, but it slows water use enough to cause rot.

Field Guide/Rubber Plant

What went wrong

Rubber Plant

Ficus elastica

Tougher than its cousin the fiddle leaf. Still a ficus.

Rubber plants are considerably more forgiving than fiddle leaf figs but share the family habit of dropping leaves when unhappy. The commonest death is straightforward overwatering, made worse by the plant's thick leaves, which stay looking glossy and healthy for weeks after the roots have failed.

By the time a rubber plant looks bad, it has usually been in trouble for a month. It is a plant that conceals its condition well.

Usually one of these

3 Likely Causes

Ranked by how often it is actually this.

01
Overwatering and root rot
Most common
What you saw
Lower leaves yellowing and dropping while upper leaves still look fine. Soil wet a week after watering. Stem soft near the base.
What it means
Let it dry substantially between waterings. Check the base of the trunk for firmness.
02
Cold draft leaf drop
Winter
What you saw
Sudden loss of several leaves with no yellowing, usually after cold weather or a door left open.
What it means
Shock rather than disease. Move it away from the draft and leave it alone.
03
Insufficient light
Chronic
What you saw
Leggy growth with large gaps between leaves, small new leaves, loss of variegation.
What it means
Rarely fatal directly, but it slows water use enough to cause rot.

The question you actually have

Dead or dormant?

Scratch the trunk near the top with a thumbnail. Green means alive. Work downward until you find green — rubber plants often die back from the top and resprout from a live lower trunk, so a bare trunk is not necessarily a dead one. Green at soil level with firm roots is worth cutting back and waiting on.

If it did not make it