I acquired mine from a plant friend in July of 2021 as a small prop plant from her larger ‘mother’. She’s let me know in the time since that hers has died, and to be honest, mine has come close! I’ll detail my care routine for mine, what I know of the origins and how to identify them, and some of the “don’t do what I did” things I’ve learned in the nearly 4 years I’ve had my plant.
The first new leaf in my care – September 2021
Identifying an Ace of Spades
Soooo…I wish I had a great answer for you on easily or consistently identifying the Ace of Spades.
I am not an expert on these, and won’t claim to have any secret sauce sureties for you. Your best bet is to buy your plant from someone reputable and/or to buy it at a decent enough size to see some leaf markers.
There are some consistent traits that are worth looking for, though:
– Large, heart-shaped leaves
– Dark, velvety color, even when hardened off
Aroid Cultivars notes that the bloom is a dark maroon, with similarly colored fruit, but I haven’t seen mine bloom yet. My plant, as well as the ones I’ve seen pictured on sites like NSE Tropicals, have a round stem all the way up to the back of the leaf (as opposed to the edges seen on A. magnificum).
From what I’ve seen, the veins are often pretty dark on these, with new leaves having reddish veins that retain that darker hue compared to other velvet leaf anthuriums. My plant had the characteristic dark leaves even as a young plant with minimal veining, which makes me side-eye the tissue-cultivated plants readily available online lately. Mine was grown as a pup/offshoot from the main plant, though, not from tissue culture, so it could be the tiny-ness of that method means greener leaves while they’re small.
January 2022, moved it out of the grow case and next to a humidifier. Tried a grow pole, too!
Once I was regularly getting new leaves, I started experimenting with how to grow the plant, knowing it would get too big to stay in my grow case pretty quickly. Before I detail all my mishaps, here’s a cheat sheet for you on what has worked for me consistently. I’ll go into more detail below.
Care at a Glance
Temperature: 70 – 85F
Light: Very bright indirect, up to a couple hours of direct morning sunlight. If growing indoors, use a grow light.
Watering needs: Regular watering is a must; let the soil get almost dry, and then water again. Can survive getting completely dry, but the leaves will be ugly.
Humidity: Must have at least 50% humidity, consistently, for healthy leaf development. Happier if it spikes higher.
Soil: Needs a chunky, airy mix for the roots, similar to all Anthuriums. 50% orchid bark/pumice + a high quality potting soil works well. Avoid soil that stays soggy, as this will rot the roots.
Fertilizer: Needs regular feeding for best appearance. Regular balanced fertilizer works well, but even fertilizer spikes do the trick.
Grow case? Humidity?
So above, I had the plant outside of my grow case, thinking it would be fine if it was next to a regularly running humidifier.
WHOMP WHOMP.
Not in our house, anyway.
What I’ve learned over the last few years is that this plant is unforgiving of laziness or mistakes, so you need to set it up and plan your care around what you will do consistently.
Letting the humidifier run out, even for just a day, seemed to result in issues. Combined with watering the plant as often as I did in the grow case, when it was actually going through water faster, led to some really ugly and sad leaf development.
Time of year played a part, too – January and February are the coldest months here, so our heater was running regularly, drying out the air. We also only keep our house at 68, so it was cooler than the Anthurium would prefer .
March, 2022 – check out how awful that leaf on the right looks! But back in the grow case, and the new leaf emerging is beautiful.
Being in inland San Diego, we rarely get rain, and humidity isn’t usually very high (although we’ve had some pretty humid summers lately). Indoors, with any kind of climate control running, humidity just gets sucked right out of the air.
I see this play out in my tropical snake tanks, with the Amazon Tree Boas I keep. They’re generally more forgiving of humidity fluctuations than the plants, seeing as how they can go lay in their water bowls, but without consistent management on my part they struggle to shed and thrive in our climate. My snakes have an automatic misting system hooked up, which takes care of their humidity issues quite neatly, but I don’t think my partner would let me set up a whole-house misting system to increase the house’s ambient humidity for the plants.
Pity.
Below, you can see that new leaf getting big enough and hardening off, big and perfect by April of 2022.
So what’s your takeaway as a fellow lover of these gorgeous plants?
If you’re struggling to get perfect leaves, consider your humidity as a top suspect. Use a good humidity gauge to monitor your humidity levels and consider ways to keep your darling Ace of Spades in a spot that stay at a higher humidity than the rest of your house.
I just invested in some high quality temperature and humidity sensors, both for my indoor grow case and my greenhouse, and absolutely love these things. I went all out and got the WiFi hub so it would reach the greenhouse from inside, and so that I can check on temperatures when I’m traveling (and call my partner to tell him to open the greenhouse doors if it’s too hot). The senor model I linked above is likely all you need, as it’s water and heat resistant. Their full Amazon shop can be found here: SensorPush
You keep saying Grow Case – what is that?
I got an Ikea grow case back in 2021, and set it up for my most precious plants.
It’s just a glass Ikea cabinet, actually, with grow lights installed. I replaced a couple of shelves with acrylic corner shelving, and basically have a miniature humid greenhouse in my home office.
It’s taken some trial and error to get it dialed in, but now that it is, it’s fantastic.
Photo is from early 2023.
The moisture equation: watering
So while many of my other Anthuriums behave more like leafy succulents than tropical plants, this bad boy absolutely is not that.
2023 was the first of a long period of being on the struggle bus for various reasons, but a big one was watering consistency. If you don’t keep up on the watering, letting it get too dry for too long before you water again, leaves get yellow. If there’s new leaves emerging, they will rapidly become super ratty and bedraggled.
You also can’t leave the soil too wet, as that will rot out the roots and cause issues. The current “main” stem of my Anthurium Ace of Spades is actually an offshoot that survived – the main branch on mine died back from my care mistakes. One such mistake was too much water for a bit, attempting to compensate for not enough.
My solution ended up being to take the plant out of porous, breathing terra cotta pots that dried out too quickly, and to repot it in plain old nursery plastic. Great drainage at the bottom, the soil didn’t dry out too fast, and it didn’t hang on to the moisture, either.
January 2023 – look at that gorgeous new leaf!
The yellowing one behind is just being absorbed for energy; learning how to encourage it to hold on to leaves longer also took me a while.
At right is the plant just a month later, in February of 2023.
The leaves are yellowing, looking funky, and the newest one doesn’t seem to have hardened off well. This photo is my last of the plant’s main stem with the largest, prettiest leaves at the time.
Just a couple months after this, I was laid off like many others in tech, and my plants definitely suffered with me in the aftermath.
I wasn’t watering consistently, and this had a multiplying effect: not only were my plants in the grow case thirsty, but with dry soil and dry leaves, the humidity in my grow case got very low. On top of that, the lights in the case heated it up, so when I didn’t water the plants enough, that grow case was dryer than the air in the rest of the house.
My Ace of Spades was one of a few plants that survived the struggle bus, but it wasn’t happy about it.
November 2023 – the new little offshoot producing leaves.
Early 2024, newest leaf showing off just what makes these plants so desireable
Feed Your Foliage
It took me longer than I’d like to admit to just accept that I am horribly inconsistent about fertilizing my indoor plants, and it shows. When I did keep up with fertilizing, I saw beautiful leaves like the red one at left.
When I didn’t, the first sign of inadequate fertilizing would be seeing the plant rapidly absorb old leaves, never keeping more than one or two at a time.
If I continued to forget to feed the plant, the new leaves emerging would stay the same size as the previous ones, be smaller, or be mutilated when they fully came out.
Ultimately, my solution was to get fertilizer sticks, and stick those in. The difference it made! Now I have a calendar reminder for every 3 months, and I just stick new ones in. Many of my tropical/exotic plants are doing significantly better just having additional, consistent food.
Soil, Rocks, and Bark
Notably, in all my trials and tribulations, I never really considered my soil mix as a problem.
This is because when I’d repot the plant, I’d see a huge mess of healthy, thick roots, and it drained readily whenever I watered it. By this time, I’d also been growing and repotting quite a few of my other Anthuriums, including plants I’d grown from seeds, so I felt confident in the mix.
I just needed my own watering and maintenance habits to match!
My mix for the last few years has been:
Roughly 50% pumice and/or orchid bark
Roughly 50% house plant soil
Don’t skip mixing up your soil! This chunky, airy mix that gives the roots room to grow and expand is a huge help for them. They’re tropical plants used to growing in humid tropical environments in fairly poor soil, and the roots need room to grow and air to breathe.
I like to also put a layer of bark or pumice on top of the soil as a top dressing, both to make it look nice and to help with moisture evaporating too quickly.
December 2024 – note the ratty leaf behind the pretty new one
It’s also important to repot your Anthurium if you start noticing that it’s hard to get fertilizer spikes into the soil, or if it’s been more than a couple years since you refreshed the soil.
My plant is currently in a 1 gallon nursery pot, and seems to be doing well in that size. I’ve taken to repotting it once a year, and it’s thriving with that cadence. It has completely filled the pot with roots, but now I’m able to trim off some excessive or older roots, and some that were attached to the older stem have been dying back.
At right – January 2025, with a big beautiful new leaf!
Recently repotted, getting regular fertilizer spikes, and watered by being dragged into the shower with me every couple weeks.
The use of fertilizer spikes seems to have made it extra happy – it’s started producing bloom stalks for the first time since I started growing the plant.
The newest leaves are also now large enough that the plant barely fits in my grow case, presenting a new challenge. I’m not sure what I’ll do when the next leaf emerges!
Wait, you didn’t talk about lighting!
To my delight, that is one thing that has been pretty easy for this plant. Compared to my Anthurium regalis, it doesn’t need quite as bright light – and it’s done amazing as long as it’s directly under a grow light.
I’ve used all of the lights listed below with zero significant change in growth; it’s been far more influenced by watering and fertilizer consistency.
- Simple grow light bars – note that these are in combination with LED strips in the front of my grow cabinet
- Super bright LED strips – 500 lumens/foot
- Sansi lightbulb style grow lights, screwed into floor lamps
- One of these hanging cross-shaped things (not a fan, it’s pretty ugly)
- Even an aquarium light bar (this heats up the grow case, but the plants love it)
If you’re looking at LED light strips (like I did), my main caveat is that the strips designed for human household lighting are usually missing a key light wavelength! They’re also finicky to install and set up in addition to being pricey for the types that are weatherproof and will hold up to the higher humidity of growing plants.
Aquarium lighting and plant grow lights, even the LED ones, are purposefully designed to include the extra lights that emit the wavelength needed for plant growth. The critical wavelength is red, by the way, which usually means grow lights for plants have little red nodes that emit just the red light, as the white light nodes won’t emit that wavelength.
Getting the blue and red wavelengths, particularly that far right infrared wavelength, is a big reason why you see lightbulb makers including these graphs. You don’t need a ton, but you do need some!
When you’re looking at grow lights, be sure to get reputable brands. There’s a ton of knockoffs now that are quite cheap, and you may not be able to trust that the light graphs pictured are actually what the bulbs put out.
Finnex aquarium lights vs the new Amazon brand, Hygger, are a good example.
Ironically, Finnex *doesn’t* include a light spectrum graph, but the quality and reviews are notable. Any light suitable for growing coral or other aquarium species is good quality. They specify elements such as that critical wavelength for plants, and when you go to their site, you can see sensical, non-typo-ridden descriptions and practical details.
A similar brand, Hygger, is all over Amazon but rife with signs of being a Chinese knock-off brand. Things like product pictures that say “mimacs” combined with the considerably lower cost makes me suspicious that it’s the quality needed for plant growth.
I have a Hygger light on a small betta aquarium in my house, and it’s working fine at growing water lettuce – but that’s water lettuce. The lettuce was growing even with just regular ceiling lights and no supplemental light at all. If you want to be certain your plants are getting the full spectrum needed for healthy leaves, it’s worth getting “proper” lights.
Grow lights, such as what Sansi makes, are in a similar price bracket as the cheap Hygger aquarium lights anyway!
Thank you for reading!
With that, this care guide is a wrap! I hope you found it helpful, and that your Anthurium Ace of Spades doesn’t experience the same struggles that mine did. 🙂
