Jess. your poor Dracaena! It's been through a lot. Tap water is fine. You don't need Spring or any other bottled water. Also, it's not sunburn. One thing you should have been doing the last 5-years is rotating your Dracaena 1/4 turn once a week. I think your Corn Plant has/d a 'Dehydration' problem. How long did it go without being watered? You didn't mention time spent away from home. You also stated the pot doesn't have drainage. Do you know the container size? Was it watered before you left? Let's say soil dried completely and was w/o water for a good amount of time. Then you returned and gave it heavy drink..Possibly too much?? Even though there are rocks on the bottom of pot, if you added too much water, the roots could have been sitting in water all this time. Do you check soil between waterings? Not only the top, but halfway or further down? Your container looks large, 'by the picture.' If the top soil dries, it doesnt' mean the bottom soil is dry too. It needs to be checked..A thin stake is sufficient. Insert the stake as deep as possible. If the stake comes out wet, the bottom soil is still wet. And visa versa. Lifting a pot is another way to check. Lift after watering. Wait a week, two, etc, and relift. If the pot is light, most likely the soil is either drying out or dry. Only you can determine its weight and use judgement whether or not it needs a drink. Why did you start watering twice a month instead of once? It's possible its roots aren't absorbing water, 'if it's beens sitting in muddy soil.' Short periods of drought won't cause much harm, but heavy periods can cause permanent damage, preventing the plant from breathing. This happens frequently. Soil dries too much, then the plant ends up over-watered. Especially if the pot is w/o drainage. If your plant was in a pot with drainage, the first thing that should have been done is, soaking in a bucket of water, until top of soil is moist. Soaking can take anywhere from 15-30 minutes. Possibly more depending on pot size and amount of soil. What type of soil was used when you last repotted? Have you repotted in the last 5-years? Do you fertilize? It's going to require some work, but you love your plant so it's well worth it. Unpot the plant. Toss out old soil. Add fresh, semi-well-draining soil. Although your pot is very pretty, instead of potting directly in the container, pot in a plastic pot w/drainage. Pot size should be determined by the root-ball. 1-3 sizes larger is fine. After your plant is potted, it can be placed in your pretty blue pot. BUT, it's important you place something inside the pot so when you water, roots don't sit in water. I use styrofoam sheets. Break a piece or two to fit inside ccontainer, 'depending on thickness,' in the blue pot, then set the plastic pot on top of the styrofoam. Water well...enough all parts of the rootball are moistened. Remove dead leaves, or trim brown edges of leaves. Is the air in your house dry? If so, start misting. Or, if your plant isn't too heavy, give it a shower. Rain water is the best medicine, but if it's cold or not raining, that's out. lol. Instead, spray each leaf. After your Dracanea settles in, renews growth, give it a half-dossage of an All Purpose Fertilizer. In the future, rotate, once a week, so the entire plant gets balanced light. an unobstructed, south window is usually harsh for Dracaneas, in summer, when sun is blazing, but since your Corn Plant has been in that window the last 5 yrs, it probably adapted. Sunburn would be obvious. I wish you luck..It's going to take some work, but you love your plant, so get to it. BTW, check its roots. Corn Plants are pretty forgiving. Toni

What is in a pot does not matter, as long as it's not toxic to the plant in some way, just its' texture & ability to retain moisture & oxygen @ the same time. If it has no inherent fertility, very effective fertilizers exist to serve those needs. I don't doubt you at all. I don't have access to ingredients for that so I can't offer any feedback about it. If buying a bag, I look for cactus/palm soil, but go more by weight over what it says, and look for a broke bag to inspect and make sure there's no peat in it, and hopefully not much perlite. If it's not lightweight for its' size, it's not helping me reduce the weight of larger pots, and probably not going to help with keeping more oxygen in the soil. Digression alert, probably on this whole post... I don't want to be confusing either, and do not offer any of this as a recommendation because it has evolved over quite some time of trial'n'error, and other, personal factors like personal acute dislike of perlite & seeing those little white things in my pots, a lot of reading about roots & microbiology, dislike of spending much $ to have something in a pot in which a plant can grow, realizing that if there is no peat, I can probably keep a plant alive, ...and especially to someone in the middle of a city without a yard. I'll use anything but peat/potting soil, and often add some roughage from compost pile. Dracaenas grow fine in ground dirt from the "good dirt" part of a tended plot, especially if I'm going to repot them often anyway. Fine for smaller plants but way too heavy for a plant of decent size. Since all old "dirt" gets put into flower beds, I don't put anything in pots that I wouldn't put in/on the ground. This is why I quit buying flats of annuals to use in the ground and started putting my house plants instead, because I kept finding styrofoam instead of perlite in the soil of them. I refuse to bury other people's non-biodegradable trash in my yard.

Dracaena Stednerii (Fragrans isn't wrong by the way in case you think I'm disagreeing, it's kind of the middle name). If it was my plant I'd cut that tall spindly shoot right back to the y-shaped joint, or rather a couple of inches above. They new growth at the base is quite unusual but not unwelcome. A handful of fresh compost wouldn't go amiss by the looks of things but not enough to bury said new shoots. That cafe decor looks really funky!

Pictures? How cold did your house get?