What do you do with the aerial roots on a Monstera?

In most cases, nothing. The ropey roots curling out of a monstera's stem are normal, healthy, and the plant grew them on purpose. There are three real things you can do with them if you want to (leave them, guide them into the pot, train them onto a pole), and one piece of advice you'll see everywhere that quietly rots the root: dropping it in a jar of water.

What Are Your Actual Options?

A monstera with ropey roots curling out of its stem is doing what monsteras do. If the plant looks healthy, the right move is usually nothing at all. Beyond that, there are three other things you can do depending on what the plant needs and how you want it to look.

• Leave them alone. The safe default, and the one that fits a casual indoor monstera. The roots aren't hurting the plant or the pot, and they don't need to be tucked or cut.
• Tuck them into the pot. If a root is long enough to reach the soil, you can guide it down and bury the tip. Once it's in the mix, it starts acting like a feeder root, which can show up as fuller, larger leaves on the next node.
• Train them onto a moss pole or coir support. This is what the plant is built for. As the aerial roots grip a damp support, the monstera climbs, the leaves get bigger, and the fenestrations (the splits and holes) get more dramatic.
• Trim selectively. If one root is in the way, draped across a shelf or growing toward the wall, you can cut it. Use clean, sharp scissors and snip close to the stem.

The decision rule is plain: healthy plant, no aesthetic complaint, no training plan? Do nothing.

Why Does My Monstera Grow Them at All?

Monstera (Monstera deliciosa) is a hemi-epiphytic climber, which is a long way of saying it's a forest plant that spends part of its life on a tree. In the rainforests of southern Mexico and Central America, its ancestors hauled themselves up tree trunks toward the canopy light. Aerial roots are the climbing rig.

Some of them anchor the stem to bark, gripping the surface so the plant can keep going up. Others drop down toward the forest floor, and once they touch soil they start absorbing water and nutrients on their own. The roots above ground and the roots below ground end up doing the same job through different routes.

In a living room there's no tree, but the plant doesn't know that. It still grows the gear. The ropes coiling off the stem and across your floor are a rainforest climber improvising in a pot, waiting for something to grab.

Did you know? A single aerial root, once it reaches soil, can grow into a full feeder root and noticeably increase the size of the next leaf on its node. That's why mature jungle monsteras have the biggest, most fenestrated leaves at the very top of their climb. The higher they get, the better fed they are.

Is It Okay to Cut Them Off?

Yes. You can trim aerial roots without hurting the plant. They aren't load-bearing for a potted monstera, and removing one won't set the plant back. Use clean, sharp scissors, cut close to the stem, and pick the roots that are actually in your way rather than stripping them all off in one go. If the plant is climbing or relying on them for support, leave the supporting ones in place and trim the loose ones.

The one thing to avoid is a piece of advice that floats around constantly: sticking a cut aerial root into a jar of water and hoping it sprouts a propagation. Aerial roots aren't built for life underwater. They've spent their existence in open air, exchanging gas with the atmosphere, and submersion tends to rot them instead of converting them into water roots. If you want to propagate a monstera, take a stem cutting with a node attached. The aerial root by itself is not the part that grows a new plant.

Why Is My Monstera Growing So Many of Them?

A monstera putting out aerial roots faster than you can keep track of is usually a healthy, maturing plant that wants something to climb. Mature stems push out more of them, and a plant in good light with room to grow will produce them in proportion to how vigorously it's growing overall. The plant isn't asking for help. It's asking for a tree, or the closest stand-in you can give it. If the proliferation is itself the question, there's a whole separate story behind why a monstera ramps up aerial-root production once it hits a certain size and stability.

Either way, the same idea holds: the aerial roots aren't a problem to manage. They're the plant doing exactly what it evolved to do, in a room where no tree is available. The most useful thing you can do is recognize that, decide whether to give it something to climb, and otherwise let the rainforest gear coil on the floor.