Friday 12 February 2016

FRIDAY GREENS #59 - PICKLE PLANT

Welcome to this meme active every Friday. The theme is "Friday Greens" and you can post images, art, photos where the predominant colour is GREEN!
GREEN is the colour between blue and yellow in the spectrum; coloured like grass or emeralds.

Delosperma echinatum (Pickle Plant) is a low shrubby sprawling succulent shrub, often prostrate but can grow to 30-40 cm tall, with thin wiry stems holding pairs of 2.5 cm long barrel-shaped green leaves that, like the younger stems, bristle with soft spine-like white hairs. From late Winter through Autumn, with a peak in Spring, appear the 2 cm wide pale yellow flowers held at the stem tips.

Plant in full sun to light shade and irrigate occasionally to very little. Hardy to around -4˚C. This plant grows well in the garden in a well-drained soil in near frost free gardens or as a potted plant. In nature this plant grows as in the shrub understory from around 500 to 3,000 feet in elevation in the Eastern Cape, South Africa. The name for the genus comes from the Greek words 'delos' meaing "visible" and and 'sperma' meaing "seed" in reference to the seed capsules not having a membranes over the top so that the seed are exposed when the fruit capsules opens. The specific epithet comes from the Greek word 'echinos' meaning "prickly" in reference to the thick hairs on the leaves. The shape of the leaf has earned this plant the common name of Pickle Plant or sometimes the confusing name of Pickle Cactus.

Delosperma echinatum was originally described by Martin Heinrich Gustav Schwantes, a German archaeologist and botanist specialist of Aizoaceae in 1927 as Mesembryanthemum echinatum in Möller's Deutsche Gärtn.-Zeitung but this plant has since been placed within several other genera in the Ice Plant family, the Aizoaceae, with names such as Delosperma pruinosum, Mesembryanthemum echinatum, Trichodiadema echinatum and Drosanthemum pruinosum. While the name Delosperma echinatum seems to be the one currently considered correct, The Plant List (the collaboration between Kew and Missouri Botanic Garden) has this name as "unresolved".
This post is also part of the Floral Friday Fotos meme

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3 comments:

  1. ....looks, as if there is a lot of fresh water inside! And the floral crown! Nature is a great artist!
    Herzlich Pippa

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    Replies
    1. ...sorry, that I already deleted my frog............!

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  2. My apology, I saw this week that Wordpress put your comment of this meme erroneously in the spam folder! Thanks for hosting this fun meme:)

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