only tangentially pertaining to vipers

[freckles_and_doubt]

smoczek introduced me to this plant, she found a specimen in the rather lovely nursery at Montebello. I don't usually have a lot of time for succulents, being more of a European-foresty sort of person, but this absolutely fascinated me. It's a bryophyllum, a genus of kalanchoe; it's a viviparous plant, i.e. produces fully-formed offspring still attached to the body of the parent, like humans or vipers; and it has this bizarre, wierd, completely alien habit of propogating by growing little rooted baby plants all along the edge of its leaves. You have no idea how odd this looks - it's like suddenly stumbling across a plant from another planet entirely, with its own strange biology. The little rooted babies fall off when they're large enough, and cheerfully root under the mother plant in a sort of carpet.

It's apparently also known as a Mexican Hat Plant, which seems altogether too mundane and jovial a name for something clearly not originating on this planet. Besides, a Mexican hat looks nothing like this, unless I imagine the classic sombrero growing little baby sombreros all around its rim, which is cute but unlikely.



You can see the few remaining plantlets on the leaves here; they grew in rows, but most of them have fallen off and rooted. It also has a very strange habit of morphing its leaf shape: the extra frills on the inner edge of the leaf where it joins the stem are new, and seem to have grown in response to the new shoot forming. If it's from another planet there are definite parallels in the environment, since it's cheerfully growing on the kitchen counter, flanked by my marble rolling pin and a small clutch of wols, in defiance of everything all the books say about it needing full sun.

It may actually be a triffid. I am charmed by the possibility.

Comments

[confluence.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Ha! I have one like this. Or rather, I have several. In high school I nicked five babies off a mother plant growing in our biology lab. Now I have a million of them, and so do my parents.

They're pretty hard to kill, and if you do manage it it doesn't really matter, since you can recolonise the failed settlement with a hundred clones from an overpopulated neighbouring planet. ;)

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

I find it particularly bizarre that, given my unaccountable addiction to house-plants during my school years and subsequently, I've never actually come across this before. It's like they had a giant SEP field attached until three months ago, and now suddenly I realise they're everywhere :>.

I shall bear your neighbourhood planet in mind if I succeed in killing this. So far it's manifesting a reasonable degree of hardihood, which is just as well, as I'm a bit cavalier with my indoor plants.

[tngr-spacecadet.livejournal.com]

Oooh! That is SO CUTE. If you have any spare baby triffids, we wants one, precioussss.

[extemporanea.livejournal.com]

Cool! I'll pot one out for you and sling it your way when it looks established. They are, indeed, ridiculously cute.

[(Anonymous)]

That looks brilliant. I do like succulents, and am quite tempted to seek one out and test the limits of this "unkillable" claim (some have green thumbs; I have a black one), but I think my European lack of sun is different to your African lack of sun...

scroob