Aloe pratensis

Aloe pratensis, commonly known as the meadow aloe, is a stemless and mostly a miniature rosette aloe that usually branches, forming clumps of up to six dense rosettes. With inflorescence it reaches around 45 cm in height. A rosette is from 15 cm to 25 cm in diameter. Pratensis (Latin) means meadow.

The thorny, lance-shaped, glaucous leaves are longitudinally lined and spined on the outer surfaces, rarely on the inner ones. The white tubercles at the base of the red-brown spines are characteristic of this species. The spines may form a keel on the outside upper half of the leaf. Leaf tips may curve in or out, reflecting seasonal wellbeing. The leaf dimensions are about 15 cm long and up to 5 cm wide at the base. The leaf sap is deep orange.

The flowers grow in simple racemes, up to four per rosette in a season, sometimes possibly seven! The raceme is unicoloured, rose red to orange red. A raceme becomes up to 20 cm long and 10 cm in diameter, some say 60 cm tall. There are conspicuous triangular bracts below the perianths, always longer than the pedicels. The cylindrical perianths are up to 4 cm long, both whorls of segments free. The inner segments have keels consisting of three crowded nerves each, red but turning green at the tips. The green capsule is three-angled, 3 cm long and 1 cm wide.

In nature one finds this species inland in KwaZulu-Natal, the eastern parts of Lesotho and parts of the Eastern Cape. 

The habitat is not meadows as the name suggests, but rocky slopes and crevices among rocks; the plants in shrubland, thicket or grassland to elevations around 1900 m. The species is not considered threatened in habitat early in the twenty first century.

This species is not commonly cultivated and considered fairly rare (Frandsen, 2017; Van Wyk and Smith, 2003; Pooley, 1998; Reynolds, 1974; Jeppe, 1969; iNaturalist; http://redlist.sanbi.org).