Dragon tree

The dragon tree comes from Madagascar, where it grows as a slender many stemmed tree in dry scrub, and it carries that habit indoors: a bare woody stem or three, topped with a fountain of narrow leaves edged in red. It is one of the most forgiving large houseplants there is, tolerant of dim offices and long gaps between waterings, and it has exactly one weakness, which is a sensitivity to what comes out of the tap.

Light

Medium to bright indirect light is where it does best, near a window with the harshest sun filtered. It survives in dimmer rooms, growing more slowly and with a duller red edge to the leaves, which is why it is the standard plant of stairwells and offices.

Direct sun through glass bleaches the leaves to a pale washed out green. If you are moving one into a brighter position, do it over a fortnight rather than in one go.

Water

Let the top half of the compost dry before watering, then soak it thoroughly and let it drain. In an average room that is roughly every twelve days in summer and every three weeks in winter. The stem stores water, so the plant copes with being forgotten far better than with being kept damp.

Water quality is the thing that matters most here. Dracaenas are unusually sensitive to fluoride and to the salts left behind by feeding, and both show as brown, dry tips on the oldest leaves first. Rainwater removes the problem almost entirely, and flushing the pot through with plain water every few months washes out what has already built up.

Feeding and repotting

Two or three half strength feeds across spring and summer is plenty, and none in winter. This is a slow plant and unused feed simply becomes the salt that browns the tips.

Repot in spring only when roots have filled the pot, which for a dragon tree may be every third year or less often. It is content slightly potbound, and the commonest way it is killed is a well meaning move into a much larger pot, where the compost around the outside stays wet for weeks and the roots rot.

Pruning and propagation

This is one of the easier plants to reshape. A tall bare stem can be cut straight across in spring, with clean secateurs, at whatever height you want it to branch, and two or three new shoots break from just below the cut within a couple of months. The plant looks alarming for a few weeks and then looks better than it did.

Nothing you cut off needs to be thrown away. The leafy top roots as a cutting in damp compost or water. So does a length of bare stem about twenty centimetres long, as long as you keep it the right way up, which is easy to lose track of once it is out of the pot; mark the top with a diagonal cut before you start.

What it is not

Two things are worth clearing up because they cause a lot of confusion in shops. It is not a palm, despite the shape, and it is not related to the dragon tree of the Canary Islands that people photograph, which is Dracaena draco and takes centuries to reach any size. The genus was also reshuffled recently and this plant is now often written as a variety of Dracaena reflexa, which is carried here as an alias so a search finds it either way.

Ailments

Brown tips are water quality first, dry air second. A steady loss of the lowest leaves is not a fault, it is how the plant builds its trunk. Several yellow leaves at once with damp compost is overwatering. A soft base means rot and usually means the pot is too big. Spider mites arrive in dry rooms and are worth checking for on the leaf undersides. The ledger below has the fixes.