Haworthia herbacea var. herbacea

Haworthia herbacea var. herbacea is a stemless leaf succulent that forms clumps, but slowly. The leaf rosette becomes about 8 cm wide.

The narrow, lance-shaped leaves curve in at their tips. The yellow-green to dull green leaf surfaces are rough from a dense covering of tiny white tubercles. The leaf margins have fairly pronounced soft white teeth or spines, also found on the keels near the tapering leaf tips. Dark translucent window areas are present on the leaves around the white dot patches.

The inflorescence, a simple raceme, becomes about 30 cm tall and carries about 20 flowers of which 3 or 4 may be open simultaneously. The flowers are beige with pinkish tips, the segment keels green. The funnel-shaped flowers are comparatively large for Haworthia, the perianth about 16 mm long, the tube 4 mm wide.

The distribution of the species is around Worcester and towards Robertson and Villiersdorp. The habitat is karoid scrub and renosterveld in shale. The variety is considered to be vulnerable in its habitat early in the twenty first century due to urban and informal settlements and additions to vineyards.

H. herbacea is difficult to distinguish from H. reticulata and H. maculata, plants of largely overlapping distributions. Survival threat to all three the varieties of H. herbacea is therefore somewhat uncertain (Scott, 1985; http://haworthiaupdates.org; www.redlist.sanbi.org).