Crassula barbata, rock and moss

Barbata meaning bearded in Latin is eminently descriptive of the young Crassula barbata plants in picture.

But do they qualify for the alternative meanings of the word (adult or the men of antiquity)? Thriving in shade and surrounded by a comfortable mossy groundcover, these ones may not take too many years before reaching their final season of producing their monocarpic one-off inflorescences.

Plants living to deliver all their accumulated resources in one flowering, have the inevitability of maturation and death more pronouncedly written into their fate; deserving of carrying the epithet barbata.

Note how some of the leaf rosettes deviate from the circular (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2010).