my 1st guess - mite damage! i get similar jagged bunching on crotons at baby-leaf stage. try spraying with may be 1:3 rubbing alcohol solution or half, since wiping is difficult for tender leaves.
although it could also be some sort of nutrient deficiency. philos are heavy feeders - but that's easy to fix.
the 3rd option -may be you are keeping it too dry?
4th ;) option - did you replant it recently? after i replanted my philo xanadu the new leaves just starting to poke out went yellow and died, though the same crowns immediately pushed out new healthy green leaves.

I normally am able to see mites or their eggs on my plants, but not in this case, and I've looked very closely. There are no tiny permanent marks on the leaves either. Alcohol spray won't hurt in any case, I guess.

Re nutrient deficiency - I feed with Foliage-Pro "maintenance" dose at every watering.

Re keeping it too dry - I've been watering/feeding it every three days or so pretty consistently. It's in very chunky soil, but the bark and the calcined DE in the mix do retain some water.

Re replanting - I did it two months ago and it did not blink.

This is how the leaves come out when they unfurl - the rips do not happen after the leaf is out.

I bought the same kind of philo and it is doing the same thing. I was thinking it was just some kind of mechanical damage to the growing point. All the leaves before the one that has what looks like a stab wound look fine, and all the ones later look abnormal.

Beautiful plant! Love that color of the new leaves. I think that this is just a simple case of "stuff happens ". Let's wait and see what these leaves look like as they mature.

It's easy to accidentally damage to growing point at the crown. Try to maintain uniform soil moisture.

Beautiful plant! Love that color of the new leaves. I think that this is just a simple case of "stuff happens ". Let's wait and see what these leaves look like as they mature.

It's easy to accidentally damage to growing point at the crown. Try to maintain uniform soil moisture.

Something tells me that an increase in humidity wouldn't hurt either. :)

The important take away from this is that it will grow out of it if you have patience.

not if it's caused by his growing conditions, it won't!
i understand if it's just on 1-2 leaves in the beginning. but if it persists, smth needs to change in upkeep.
it happens sometimes on my caladiums too - i think it's when the top soil dries a bit too much when the shoot is young. though my humidity never drops below 60%. and during summer it's at 80%.
so the comment on 'needs more humidity' could apply too.
i tried searching for this condition - it's impossible to find any reference to it. tried all sorts of phrases, can't find anything at all. can anybody point me to some site describing this?
smth similar also happened on my stromanthe - the bottom edges of the leaf dried up - i think it's because i xplanted it with bare-root just as it was developing . guess, if the water supply as interrupted even a little - the developing tissues suffer immediately.
this condition seems to happen to aroid plants with rolled up leaves: alocasia, philo, caladiums... there must be a reference to it somewhere?

Some of My aroids do something similar, no philos tho, when the new leaf emerges from the older petiole, the tender new leaf can get hung up while trying to slip out, it courses all sorts if weird looking damage very similar to that!
The edges of the damaged portion that's gets ripped away as the leaf slips out get strange scarring on it, just as your plant has, not at all like what you would expect a ripped leaf to look like, the appear deformed not ripped...

> I bought the same kind of philo and it is doing the same thing.

Hmm. Is there such a thing as genetic predisposition to such damage for this particular kind of plant? Googled images show a smooth narrowing of leaves close to the petiole for this philo (as does my picture), and in my picture you see that the rips appear gradually from that narrowing from older smoother-edged leaves to younger more ripped ones.

> Let's wait and see what these leaves look like as they mature.

They are not gonna regrow the ripped parts, that's for sure.

> It's easy to accidentally damage to growing point at the crown.

On each of the three leaves the came out consecutively over weeks? I can't imagine. Plus, the damage is not at the growing tip, it is closer to the back of the leaves as you can see.

> Try to maintain uniform soil moisture.

I've been watering every 3 days or so very consistently.

> Something tells me that an increase in humidity wouldn't hurt either.

This is going to be challenging going into the winter (though I could stick it under plastic), but these damaged leaves were coming out in the summer when humidity was fine. I turn on my a/c very rarely, almost never in that room.

> it happens sometimes on my caladiums too - i think it's when the top soil dries a bit too much when the shoot is young.

Well, caladium new leaves grow directly out of the soil (I think), so I understand why soil condition may affect the leaves more directly. This one grows leaves above the soil on a low stem, so they never are in contact with the soil.

> i tried searching for this condition - it's impossible to find any reference to it. tried all sorts of phrases, can't find anything at all. can anybody point me to some site describing this?

I tried googling "ripped leaves" before posting, so basically the same language I use here, but I also found nothing.

> Some of My aroids do something similar, no philos tho, when the new leaf emerges from the older petiole, the tender new leaf can get hung up while trying to slip out

I think I know exactly what you mean - the S-shaped young shoot/leaf at the bottom of the attached picture is shaped like that because its tip was stuck in the petiole of the mature leaf on the left. It happens to my caladiums too, but so far it has not resulted in similar leaf damage. I do help the caladium leaves out when I see them stuck like that. The Philodendron leaves do not get stuck like that - they come out and unfurl out of a perfectly fine looking growing tip.

Some of you are making too much of this. The plant has short petioles, not giving the leaves enough room they begin to unfurl. It will likely outgrow that characteristic as time goes by. It may have even been treated with growth regulators by the grower, keeping it compact and shrubby until the chemicals wear off.

Prince of Orange and philodendrons like it have a very high tolerance for the conditions found in the average home or office and need no special consideration for humidity whatsoever.

That's part of the reason that they have been so popular for so long.

Hmm....Well it's kind of fun to have everyone offering their ideas about what is going on, it gives one lots to think about. Something to add to the pile of info and conjectures is the fact that my PoO has the damage on the lower right edge of the leaf not the lower left. I would think that if it was damage from the leaf catching on a dry edge when it is unfurling, that it would always be on the same side of the leaf. (I imagine that the leaves are always rolled up in the same direction?) We are experiencing one of the wettest years here in SD that anyone can remember. We just had three feet of heavy wet snow a week ago and currently it is raining like crazy again. We are under a flood watch, I hope we don't float away. The hygrometer in my house reads 68 percent. So if that isn't humid enough, then I'd really better quit my attempts at growing things other than cacti and succulents. This really is the year for it I thought.

Actually, I wasn't talking about that...
You can't see it when it happens, it's deep within the plant that the damage happens, in the scenario I presented.
Lets see if I can get a pic of the damage.

I actually got several good pics!
I have no place to host them off site so sorry for the barrage of posts...

Notice how it's not dead around the hole, but instead has a smooth scar, with a rounded edge, you can feel this edge.

This, And the next pic are the leaf back, you can see folds throughout the leaf at this angle, it makes me think it was constricted in the petiole.

This post was edited by grabmebymyhandle on Fri, Oct 11, 13 at 12:12

This plant is colocasia esculenta "jacks giant"
It has 3 leaves like this, several other of my EE do this intermittently.
I don't think it hurts them, but EE drop leaves rapidly!
Philos don't! It could totally ruin the look of a nice plant, I'd be displeased to say the least!

Here's a new roller emerging, it's wedged in there really tight!
Sometimes I tease them of some EE, I just can't resist, sometimes I rip one a bit, the damage isn't even remotely similar!

I realize this looks alot different than the philo in question, but the scaring along the edge, although smooth on my EE and very toothed and jagged on the philo, looks very similar, to me atleast.

I'd like to understand it better, there's ALOT of variables, but I notice it most when it's hot and I'm fertilizing ALOT, so the plants are growing extremely fast.
I'd also to very respectfully disagree with rhizo_1, one of the joys I get from gardening is learning about my plants, and attempting to understand them, we all garden for different reasons and in different ways.
It's also not very attractive, if something's messing up my plant I want to fix it!
I do think you could be onto something, I'm referring to the use of growth regulators or other chems in a large scale greenhouse operation, that, or the fact that it's growing conditions have changed dramatically over the past weeks or months, could have a dramatic affect on a plant!
Aroids also react differently to many chems that could be used in the setting they were in.
Time for more experimentation!

I really have never done the surgery to tell, but I have this idea that the growing point on the philo is organized with all the proto leaves wrapped up around each other down inside the stem, such that if you were to take a knife and cut down the side of the growing point you could damage all the baby leaves it contains with one stroke, if it were deep enough. Kind of like an onion maybe, but down inside the stem. If so, it really wouldn't matter how long it was before the leaves matured, they would have the damage before they started to enlarge. So I had the idea that this is something that would take a while to go away, but it doesn't seem to be a problem to my plant, it just doesn't look like the pictures when you Google. It hasn't gotten worse or better so far, but I am getting a new leaf right now so we'll see if it is better or worse.

Handle, it seems like every time I try to help, I do some kind of damage, so I have pretty much given up on helping plants unfurl their leaves. They are on their own, and if they can't pop those seed coats off, or if they can't get unrolled, so be it.

As was said, it is very easy to damage the growing point and unfurled leaves of a plant like this. Jostling and jiggling can do it!