String of Pearls: rot at the soil line — what does it look like?

Strands detach at the crown with a mushy brown base while the trailing ends look fine. Pearls near the pot going translucent or squashy. Salvage healthy trailing strands and lay them on dry mix to root at the nodes. The crown is usually unrecoverable.

String of Pearls: underwatering — what does it look like?

Pearls shrivelled, wrinkled or pointed rather than round, feeling soft and empty rather than mushy. Shrivelled-but-firm is thirsty and fixable. Mushy is rot. The difference is texture, not appearance.

String of Pearls: insufficient light — what does it look like?

Long gaps between pearls, small pale pearls, strands thinning. Needs bright light including some direct sun. A dim shelf is a slow death sentence.

Field Guide/String of Pearls

What went wrong

String of Pearls

Curio rowleyanus

Photographs beautifully. Dies quietly from the middle outward.

String of pearls is a succulent that does not look like one, and it is killed by being treated as a trailing houseplant. It is watered weekly like a pothos, in a pot too deep for its very shallow roots, and it rots at the soil line while the visible strands still look plump.

The other half of the problem is light. In insufficient light the strands stretch, the pearls space out and shrink, and the plant slowly gives up without any dramatic moment to react to.

Usually one of these

3 Likely Causes

Ranked by how often it is actually this.

01
Rot at the soil line
Most common
What you saw
Strands detach at the crown with a mushy brown base while the trailing ends look fine. Pearls near the pot going translucent or squashy.
What it means
Salvage healthy trailing strands and lay them on dry mix to root at the nodes. The crown is usually unrecoverable.
02
Underwatering
Also common — it is a narrow window
What you saw
Pearls shrivelled, wrinkled or pointed rather than round, feeling soft and empty rather than mushy.
What it means
Shrivelled-but-firm is thirsty and fixable. Mushy is rot. The difference is texture, not appearance.
03
Insufficient light
Chronic
What you saw
Long gaps between pearls, small pale pearls, strands thinning.
What it means
Needs bright light including some direct sun. A dim shelf is a slow death sentence.

The question you actually have

Dead or dormant?

Run a strand through your fingers. Firm pearls anywhere along it mean living tissue you can propagate, even if the crown has rotted away entirely. Uniformly papery, hollow pearls that crumble mean it is finished. Almost every string of pearls can be restarted from one surviving length.

If it did not make it