You actually don’t have to prune peace lilies.
Which I suppose also means that if you’re looking to change the shape of your peace lily, you, er, can’t.
However, if your peace lily is looking a bit sad and bashed up, there is some general housekeeping you can do.
Removing dead leaves
I mean, it’s a peace lily, there’s gonna be a lot of them! Unfortunately, this isn’t always as easy as it seems. Peace lily leaves may look (and be!) dead, but they don’t always come away from the mother plant super easily.
So, get out your scissors and snip the petiole (the bit that attaches the leaf to the stem) as close to the stem as you can. There may be a bit of brown crispy bit left, but after a few weeks that should come away super easily.
Excuse the gap between the inner pot and the outer one. I picked up the inner pot to show how long the roots had got for a video, and a lot of leca fell out. Rather than pick it all out i just…left it.
Removing dead flowers
Removing the dead flowers is the same idea (i.e. snip as close to the plant as you can) BUT it may need to be done in a couple of stages.
The flowers emerge from the sheath of the leaves, and they’re in quite a firm tube which CAN open, but you risk damaging the leaf.
Snip off the flower as close to the leaf as you can then leave it. After a few weeks the flower stem will dry out and you *should* be able to just slide it out of the petiole.
Do excuse the image quality – I had to zoom way in.
Changing the shape of your peace lily
The most common reason people want to prune their peace lily is that they want to change its shape.
You…can’t really. If you try to shape the leaves by cutting them, the leaves the edges will go brown and it’ll look extremely sad.
Peace lilies naturally grow on the rainforest floor and are slef-heading, which means that all the leaves from from a central ground – they don’t climb like Monstera – they produce plantlets around the central crown and spread out horizontally.
If your peace lily doesn’t have the same growth pattern as others you’ve seen, you will likely have a different cultivar. Some produce shorter leaves, so look super bushy very quickly, whilst other grow long, thin leaves. You also get smaller varieties and some absolutely freaking huge ones.
The environment you keep your lily in will also affect it’s growth pattern. Keeping it in low light will likely encourage long, spindly growth.
Removing the crown of your peace lily
One issue you might have (especially if you’ve had your peace lily as long as I have) is that the older leaves die off leaving a circle of…nothing in the middle:
There isn’t really anything you can do about this other than divide the healthy parts round the edge separately so you can remove the crown. So if I wanted to remove that brown bit in the photo above, I would cut off the green section in the bottom of the picture (a knife is best but I’m a ripper) and then cut out the brown bit.
I would then pot all the divided sections together and have a nice full plant without the gap in the middle.
You, of course, don’t NEED to remove the brown bit. It likely still has healthy roots. But over time they can get quite large bald patches that aren’t the most aesthetically pleasing.
Pruning the roots
Root pruning is one of those things that HORRIFIES a lot of plant people, but sometimes it needs to be done! If a peace lily is rootbound but I don’t want to put it in bigger pot root pruning is the easiest option. I literally take the plant out of the pot and slice an inch or so (depending on the size of the pot, but my rule of thumb is don’t remove more than one third of the roots) using a bread knife or something similar.
Discard the bottom part, add in some fresh soil and your peace lily will soon regrow the lost roots.
In conclusion
The good news is that you don’t need to prune peace lilies bar removing any dead foliage and flowers. The bad news is that if your peace lily isn’t the shape you want there isn’t a lot you can do about it.
THAT BEING SAID
A lot of issue people have with peace lilies, such as scraggly and leggy growth and brown marks on the leaves can be eradicated with proper care.
Wow, that thumbnail looks like a mugshot.
