There are a lot of houseplants with exciting leaves, but only a small number of them bloom. Even though peace lilies have beautiful leaves, the spathes, which look like flowers, set them apart from other plants. It makes sense that you’d want to ensure your beautiful Peace Lily blooms.
But a peace lily might not bloom for a number of reasons, which could make it hard to solve the problem.
The failure of peace lilies to blossom is often caused by the use of excessive fertilizer, which promotes the development of excessive, drooping foliage at the price of flowering. Moreover, peace lilies don’t blossom in too much shadow and require strong indirect light to promote blooming.
Please continue reading to learn the causes of your peace lily’s failure to bloom and how to fix them so your plant may bloom more often.
RELATED: How To Revive A Dying Peace Lily: Essential Tips and Tricks
Top Reasons Why Your Peace Lily Is Not Flowering
1. Excessive Fertilizer
When they get too much fertilizer, the leaves grow quickly, and the peace lily flowers don’t come out. Peace lily plants have evolved to grow slowly because they live in a mostly shaded rainforest with slightly fertile soil. So, they don’t like to live in places where the soil is full of nutrients.
Peace lilies grow very slowly compared to other houseplants with leaves, like Pothos or Monstera. If regular fertilizer is used too often or in too large of amounts, this causes the plant to grow more leaves and fewer flowers.
If your peace lily produces blooms, they quickly change from white to verdant green so the plant can make food from sunlight. This gives the impression that they are not blooming. Learn more about the green flowers of the Peace Lily.
But peace lilies might not be able to bloom if they stay in the same pot for a long time and use up all the nutrients in the potting soil.
Solution
Finding the right amount of fertilizer is important if you want your peace lilies to bloom more. Use half or even a quarter of the normal strength of liquid houseplant fertilizer on peace lilies. This will make sure that the peace lily gets just the right amount of nutrients to help its leaves and flowers grow without being too heavy on the plant and stopping it from blooming.
Most of the time, you only need to put fertilizer on your plants twice: once in the spring and once during the summer season.
If fertilizers are already applied to your peace lily and it still has few blossoms or the flowers have changed from white to green, there is little you can do immediately to fix the problem. Instead, you should use the best ways to grow plants, like high humidity and bright, indirect lighting.
Your peace lily might come back the next year and bloom well.
2. Low Humidity and Drought
Tropical plants like peace lilies thrive in conditions with high relative humidity and consistently wet but well-draining soil. The peace lily plant will not blossom if interior heating or drafts cause the humidity to drop too low and the soil to become too dry.
While peace lily plants are common houseplants and have the ability to handle generally low humidity in comparison to their native tropical habitat, there are a number of circumstances that might cause the humidity to drop to a threshold at which a peace lily plant would find it difficult to blossom, like:
- Dry air coming from forced radiators and air systems
- Air conditioning
- Open doors and window drafts
Any of these elements dehydrates the peace lily’s leaves, drying off the plant leaf tips and overstressing the plant, preventing it from flowering.
High indoor temperatures and underwatering, where your peace lily plant may not get enough water or is lightly watered, are aggravating factors that often inhibit blossoming.
Solution
To combat the dry air and reduce the rate of water loss from the leaves, wet the peace lily’s leaves every other day, or use a humidifier. Improving the environment makes it easier for your peace lily to blossom.
Avoid placing the peace lily close to any heat sources, and make sure it is not directly exposed to any air currents from forced air, draughts, or air conditioning.
To ensure the roots have sufficient access to water and avoid drought stress, make sure to water your peace lilies liberally so that extra water flows down from the bottom of their pots after each watering session.
Waiting until the top of the soil has begun to dry out a little before you give the soil a deep soak will allow you to satisfy the peace lily’s watering needs without running the danger of root rot. This is the ideal watering and soil moisture balance for peace lilies.
The peace lily may blossom more profusely in an environment that mimics the humidity levels and soil wetness that they regularly encounter.
3. Seasonal Flowering
It is significant to notice that a peace lily’s flower naturally, and as indoor plants, bloom most profusely in the spring and summer when the days are longer, and the light is stronger.
But, peace lilies that are still fully bloomed may be purchased from a shop or from expert gardeners throughout the fall and winter, or at any other time of the year. This is due to a technique utilized by expert gardeners that use gibberellic acid to encourage peace lilies to blossom at any time of year so they would seem more appealing for sale.
However, by intentionally modifying the peace lily’s environmental circumstances using grow lights, ideal humidity, and temperature, your plant may also bloom. This implies that the peace lily may be in full bloom at any time of year.
Nevertheless, if you bring the peace lily home in the late fall or winter, it may start to blossom less often or possibly stop altogether.
Solution
The only remedy is to exercise patience and understand that peace lilies will probably begin to blossom once again in the summer and spring. This mimics the peace lily’s natural habitat’s seasonal blossoming cycle.
To guarantee the peace lily has enough energy to blossom, water the plant when the soil’s surface feels dry in the interim, spritz the plant’s leaves, and place it in a location with strong indirect light.
4. Improper Temperature Conditions
Between 68°F and 85°F (20°C to 30°F) is the ideal temperature range for peace lilies flower to develop, with the nighttime temperature being around 10°F colder. This closely resembles the temperature range and regular variation that peace lilies are used to in their natural habitat.
A strained peace lily that doesn’t blossom is the consequence of any extended temperatures at either extreme of this range.
Evening temperatures that are much below 60°F (15°C) are likely to cause slowed growth and significantly fewer blossoms. Although temperatures over 85°F (30°C) cause the peace lily to droop and become too stressed to blossom.
Solution
It is crucial to keep the peace lily away from any interior heating sources and from chilly window sills in order to maintain a daily temperature range of between 68°F to 85°F, which is about room temperature.
A window sill is often several degrees colder than the rest of the room, so if your peace lily is there, make sure the leaves are not touching the glass.
RELATED: How to Repot A Peace Lily: Helpful Tips To Avoid Transplant Problems
5. Low Lighting Conditions
Originally from Central and South America, peace lilies are tropical plants that have evolved to thrive in bright, shaded areas away from any direct sunshine. If the peace lily is situated in a severely shaded place with little light, it may develop rich foliage but with far fewer blossoms or even no flowers.
For the peace lily to blossom, it requires appropriate light intensity and day length. Brighter light signals the plant that the time of year is already best for flowering, so how much light is reaching your plant is very crucial.
Solution
It’s crucial that the plant be situated in indirect bright light to encourage flowering in peace lilies. This helps to replicate the peace lily’s natural environment’s optimal blooming circumstances, including brilliant light shielded from direct sunlight by above vegetation.
Remember that a bright area could also have low humidity and a different airflow, so be careful to water the peace lily or use a humidifier to lessen any shock it might receive from being transferred abruptly.
Use a pair of pruners to remove the individual leaves from your peace lily if they have been burned yellow by direct sunshine. A scorched leaf won’t turn green again, so it can’t provide energy to the plant.
The peace lily should be able to produce more blossoms in the weeks that follow if you have located a site with the ideal balance of light.
6. Improper Watering
For peace lilies to have a strong root system that is able to distribute nutrients and moisture throughout the plant and provide it the necessary resources to produce blossoms, the soil must be equally wet yet well draining.
Too much moisture in the soil may prevent oxygen from reaching the plant soil, which halts the root respiration process. If the roots will not be able to breathe, they cannot efficiently transfer nutrients and water effectively, resulting in a drooping peace lily plant with yellowing leaves, that cannot bloom.
Extremely wet soil may result from the following:
- overwatering the peace lily
- potting soil that is compacted and drains too slowly
- pots without a base drainage hole
Solution
To bloom peace lilies, the soil needs to be able to drain well. This is something that needs to be done. This means that you should only water your peace lily plant when the soil’s top starts to dry.
There is no one way to figure out the right amount of water your plant needs because the climate is different everywhere. So, if you want to find the right balance for your conditions, you should always check the soil moisture of your peace lily to see when the soil is starting to dry out.
When repotting a plant, the soil may be pressed down hard if it drains too slowly. If so, move your peace lily to a new pot with the regular soil mix that has been improved, preferably by adding perlite to help it drain better.
Ensure the drainage holes in your pot aren’t blocked by packed soil, which could worsen drainage. Also, always empty trays and saucers of extra water after watering. With enough drainage, the peace lily should be able to grow and bloom well during spring and early summer.
Read more about proper watering of Peace Lilies.
7. Old Age
Every living thing ages, and as it does so, it loses the capacity to procreate. Both people and plants have this characteristic.
Your peace lily is trying to reproduce by forming a bloom. A peace lily will keep growing roots and leaves, but ultimately it will reach the end of its life cycle. Although peace lilies may survive for many years, if you’ve owned yours for close to ten years, it’s likely that the plant is now just too old to produce blossoms.
Young plants, on the other hand, are likewise unable to reproduce. Your plant is probably just too young to blossom if it is only two to three years old. For a plant to dependably blossom, it must be about two years old.
Your plant was probably administered gibberellic acid to push it to bloom if, despite being tiny and immature, it was blooming when you bought it.
If the plant was little and blossoming when you purchased it, blossomed for a month or two, and hasn’t bloomed since you may be quite positive that this was the case. Any plant that is in a container that is six inches or smaller is probably too young. It will only take a few years for it to develop. Enjoy the magnificent greenery while you can.
RELATED: Trimming or Pruning Peace Lily: How and Why Is It Important For Peace Lily Growth
The Truth About Peace Lily’s in Shops
You might wonder why, when you go to a florist, the Peace Lilies they sell are often in bloom long after the time when peace lilies are supposed to bloom.
Gibberellic acid, a plant hormone that not many people know about, is the key. This hormone makes young plants bloom for longer than they normally would. Even though the time for a peace lily flower to bloom is long over, the young plant will start to bloom in two months after it has been watered and put into the potting mix.
Even though this magic trick might seem like the best way to get more flowers on your plant, there are a few things you should keep in mind. First of all, this chemical treatment goes against the way things work in nature.
Even though it will make peace lily bloom at the wrong time of year, the next flowers and leaves may be misshapen. If the plant blooms outside of its natural flowering season, it might not be able to bloom as well the next time around.
Final Thoughts
It’s possible that there is a care issue if your Peace Lily is not blooming. Take some time to ensure the plant receives what it needs since issues with fertilizer and watering are also frequent.
Be a responsible plant owner, and ensure you follow the fundamentals on how to help your Peace lily grow healthy and strong! Read about getting more Peace Lily flowers to have a more enchanting garden.
Hope you find my tips on peace lily not blooming helpful. Make sure to check out our other articles:
How To Save An Overwatered Peace Lily From Dying? A Comprehensive Guide
Here Is Why Your Peace Lily Flowers Are Turning Brown & How To Fix It Fast!
Peace Lily: Top Reasons Why They Droop and How To Fix Them
The majority of people who have no interest in the subject, and aren’t green fingered assume that all plants and vegetables require the same growing conditions. This is not the case at all. Each plant has its own unique and interesting history and growing process.
I hope you will find The Natural List useful, and that it will help educate you on the wide variety of different flower and plant species there are across the globe.
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