Will the REAL ice plant please stand up?

Mesembryanthemum barklyi

First of all you have to grok* the SCALE of this puppy: it's almost a yard across from leaf tip to leaf tip. As a lover of little plants I ignored these for a while, but eventually couldn't keep doing so. Eventually I came to my senses and began to look at them more carefully.

Somewhere in the thousands of images I took on my recent trip to Namaqualand I have pictures of whole fields full of these. Or maybe I just took mental pictures. Jan is there for scale. And 'cause she's cute.

When you realize most of these are annuals or very short lived, you begin to marvel more at their growing all winter in time to bloom for a month or two in late spring before succumbing to the great heat and drought of the Namaqualand summer 

These have all been Mesembryanthemum barklyi: I wish I'd taken ten times more pictures (just compare this to the first)--it is so variable in different lights!

Mesembryanthemum crystallinum

The former's sister species gets just as humongous, an is (if anything) even more variable. This is the one occasionally grown in gardens--not always easy to do. Rather than the hairs of barklyi, this has the crystalline exudations that give this plant its specific name, and the entire Family one of their best known common names: "Ice Plants". Of course, many genera in the family share the capacity to form icy crystals--especially Drosanthemum and even Delosperma cooperi. But their generic epithet is not Mesembryanthemum! This is THE ice plant! And it does indeed stand up and stand out all over the dry parts of South Africa by the million!

And just a few more shots to show its extraordinary multiplicity of forms. I think I shall need to try and grow this monster--not sure where, somewhere. Soon!

Get a load of this behemoth! Would LOVE to see it in bloom (the flowers are very cool too--but not as cool as the leaves and habit.

 Even in spectacular death they are pretty awesome.

A host of genera have recently been sunk into the genus Mesembryanthemum including (notably) the equally widespread and abundant Phyllobolus. I don't approve of that lumping--much to extreme to my taste.

I'd rather we keep the Genus name restricted to these gentle giants of the Veld.

Oh to go back and see them there, graced with a gentle wind from the Karoo...

*grok: if you've not read Stranger in a Strange Land, it's not to late to do so. I'm not much of a Sci-Fi reader, but this is a classic!

Grok[edit]

The word "grok", coined in the novel, made its way into the English language. In Heinlein's invented Martian language, "grok" literally means "to drink" and figuratively means "to comprehend", "to love", and "to be one with". The word rapidly became common parlance among science fiction fans, hippies, and later computer programmers^[19] and hackers,^[20] and has since entered the Oxford English Dictionary.^[21]

The last quote is from Wikipedia. Since I'm not a Sci-fi fan, a programmer or hacker, I must be a hippie.