Spider Mites
Tiny sap-sucking mites that thrive in warm, dry air and quietly bronze a plant before you see them.
🔍 How to spot it
Spider mites are almost too small to see - specks of red, brown or straw on the undersides of leaves. The first real clue is usually fine, silky webbing in leaf joints and a faint yellow or bronze stippling across the leaf, as if it has been dusted with pale pepper. Hold a sheet of white paper under a leaf and tap it: if the dots move, you have mites.
💥 The damage it does
They pierce leaf cells and drain the sap, so leaves lose colour, turn dry and papery, and eventually crisp and drop. Populations explode in hot, dry conditions and can overwhelm a plant in a couple of weeks, especially thin-leaved species near a radiator or sunny window.
🧴 How to treat it
Isolate the plant first. Rinse it hard in the shower or with a hose to knock mites off, then treat every few days with insecticidal soap or a horticultural oil, coating the leaf undersides where they live. Repeat for two to three weeks to catch newly hatched mites, since eggs survive a single spray. Raising humidity slows them down while you work.
🛡️ How to prevent it
Mites hate humidity, so mist-prone rooms and grouped plants get fewer outbreaks. Wipe leaves now and then, keep plants off hot dry windowsills in summer, and quarantine anything new for a couple of weeks before it joins the collection.
🌿 Plants that get spider mites
Worst on thin-leaved tropicals and anything kept warm and dry. These 95 profiled plants name them in their own troubleshooting notes:
Houseplants 83
Garden 10
Struggling to save a plant? The plant rescue guides walk through recovery step by step, and the problem solver works backwards from a symptom. This is general growing advice, not a diagnosis for a specific plant.