Maranta arundinacea
Arrowroot is the plant behind the starch of the same name. It is a clumping herb, 0.3–1.5 m tall, that grows from fleshy underground rhizomes. It is native from Mexico and the Caribbean to northern South America and grows on moist forest floors, usually in clearings or edges where light is fairly strong. Where the dry season is marked, the leaves die back and the rhizomes rest, so it is best treated as a warm, bright, seasonally growing plant rather than an everlasting foliage plant like its prayer-plant relatives.
Where it grows wild
A terrestrial herb of moist evergreen and deciduous forest floors, most often in clearings, gaps and edges where light is relatively high. It also turns up along streams and on disturbed ground, partly because it has been grown as a crop for thousands of years. Rhizomes sit shallowly in loose, moist, fertile soil.
Mostly a lowland plant. The 578 records with an elevation have a median of 220 m and reach 1750 m. Crop sources give up to about 1000 m as its natural range. The −79 m minimum is a recording error.
🔒 Growing it like that
The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
Grow Maranta arundinacea? Add it to a free garden and its full profile opens. Pro opens all 38,374 profiles in the library, plants and fungi.
More Maranta
Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app.