Over lockdown, I've been building up a collection of Kalanchoe plants.
I had one as a child. A 'Mother of Thousands,' it resembled the ones currently available but I remember the leaves being slightly different. The most notable thing about a Mother of Thousands is the row of tiny baby plants all along the edges of the mature leaves. I loved looking at them, the babies perfectly-formed miniatures of the mother, like Mandelbrot plants, and most of all I liked taking the newly-rooted babies off the leaves. They have a perfect amount of attachment, so it takes exactly the right amount of slight force to dislodge them, and they snap off with a just-audible tweaking sound that is 100% the correct level of tweaking sound. I'm unsure how to describe how made-for-humans this plantlet attachment seems to be. The nearest sensory activity would be popping the shell of what Americans call "English Peas" and pulling out the peas with a thumbnail.
Lucky for me I had a large plant, so new leaves were ready to depopulate soon after.
Having tried, during lockdown, Mexican Jumping Beans (fun soon wore off, both for me and them) and Grow Live Sea Monkeys (they were much as I remembered them), a Drosera (carnivorous plant) and a Venus Flytrap (dits), I found that Amazon also carried live Mothers of Thousands.
Once I had one, I developed a habit and went on the explore the whole Kalanchoe oeuvre, which I'll discuss here over the next few posts. Kalanchoe are succulents, and grow in cactus medium or potting soil with a little sand or pumice to keep it draining well. They are African and Madagascar plants, which as you can imagine, like sunlight and relatively dry soil. I won't go into details as I show mine, but I'll give links to resources.
The one pictured below was sold to me as a Kalanchoe diagremontiana, Mother of Thousands. It's quite likely it's a Kalanchoe x houghtonii, a hybrid that includes diagremontiana. I guess unless you intend to sell seeds, it doesn't really matter.
It arrived bare-root in the winter and has been growing outside in Southern California ever since. Growth was slow but steady, and in the past few weeks it's started producing the plantlets along the leaf margins. If I leave them alone, they'll root when the leaf dies and drops off. If I push them off, the more mature ones will root as soon as they land. One of these plants is often surrounded by a little plantation of babies, and every time you repot a plant, you end up with a few transferred across to every pot you used that day. (One Kalanchoe is regarded as an invasive in some countries because of this habit.) It seems mean to compost them but you can't grow them all.
It's one of two types of Kalanchoe with that common name and you also see it advertised as an Alligator Plant, from its sharp, toothy-looking leaves, and Devil's Backbone, which I think is just plain mean, poor thing. More recently, it's been sold as a Khaleesi Plant. Catchy name!
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