Crassula orbicularis

Crassula orbicularis, in Afrikaans the klipblom (stone flower), is a small perennial succulent growing an annual flower stalk to 20 cm in height.

This plant, commonly known as hen-and-chickens, grows several stolons or runners from large rosettes that allow tiny stolon-tip plantlets to root close by. Other plant species also proliferate via such “chickens”, e.g. Chlorophytum comosum, another South African plant that goes by the hen-and-chickens vernacular name. When observing such a stand, it is sometimes not known which plants are (or were) connected by stolons as opposed to having grown independently from seed. Slight genetic differences may be displayed by the seed plants, not by the stolon-generated or vegetatively generated ones.

The species distribution is in the Western Cape from around Montagu to the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. In the photo numerous leaf rosettes have made their home on the steep gradient of an angled forest rock providing life-supporting crevices next to a road in the Wilderness. The plants are sometimes abundant sheltered under shrubs in clay soils. The species is not considered threatened in habitat early in the twenty first century (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2015; iNaturalist; iSpot; http://redlist.sanbi.org).