Spider Plants

I have a variegated spider plant, that was given to me five or six years ago.  It just needed a little work, some love and a dose of compost.  This spring while cutting most of the new babies from their stems to replant I saw a few that were an odd color, having many to get in pots before being placed outside I did not give any more though to those odd colored ones.  

This past week I had to replant some of those same babies as they are now out growing their first pots.  And I do indeed have three solid green babies from a variegated mother plant.  Any ideas how this could have happened???

I love a good mystery!!

Peace

little mutations can happen pretty much anywhere, and plants are such that they can deal with some internal variations of their genetic code. this sometimes how new fruit varieties are found, as a different branch on a known cultivar tree.

The variegation is from mutation in only part of plant tissues. In this sense, the plant is a chimera. When a new spider plant pup is forming, normally it has both cells and retains the color pattern. In your case, maybe the green pup is initiated from just the wildtype cells and loses the light coloring. Here is a picture of my variegated and reverse variegated spider plants all in one pot. Noted the color difference in both the leaves and the stems.

Loss of variegation though propagation is common in other house plants. In variegated snake plant and African violet, when propagated from leaf cuttings the trait will be lost. Instead, they are multiplied from new shoots from the rhizome or crown cuttings to keep the chimeric cells  

Thanks for the posts, good information in both.  I have another spider plant story.  Like most plant folks, I did not have enough good windows for all my plants to be overwintered, many were crowded together on a table, some even sharing the same pot for the winter.  My two spider plants, the solid and the variegated were treated in the same way, sharing a pot till spring.  Once replanted in their own hanging baskets with fresh soil and compost and back outside, a nesting pair of wrens would find the variegated plant regardless of where I would hang it and build a new nest in that plant.  They seemed very happy, I was happy, my plant got free fertilizer for a few weeks!

Peace