Tip burn from salts or tap-water chemicals
Browning tips paired with heavy feeding or hard tap water usually means a chemical build-up burning the roots.
Diagnosis
Tip burn from salts or tap-water chemicals
What's happening
Anthurium is unusually sensitive to mineral salts. Excess fertilizer accumulates in the soil and scorches the fine root tips, while chlorine and fluoride from tap water do the same — both showing up as browning, dead leaf tips and sometimes a white crust on the soil surface.
How to fix it
Flush the pot: run plenty of room-temperature water through the soil until it drains freely, several times over, to wash the salts out. Then cut feeding back to a gentle quarter to half strength every 3–4 weeks in the growing season only. If your tap water is hard or heavily treated, switch to filtered, distilled, or rainwater, or leave tap water out overnight before using it.
What fixes it
- A balanced liquid fertilizer — Switching to a gentle, balanced liquid feed dosed at quarter strength stops the salt build-up that scorches anthurium root tips.
If that doesn't fix it
This is general guidance based on common symptoms; individual plants vary.
Read the full Anthurium care guide →
Reviewed June 2026 · how we check this