Crassula orbicularis, in Afrikaans the klipblom (stone flower), is a small perennial succulent growing an annual flower stalk to 20 cm in height.

In the photo they have made their home on the steep gradient of an angled forest rock providing life-supporting crevices next to a road in the Wilderness. Their home or its? This plant, commonly known as hen-and-chickens, grows several stolons or runners from large rosettes that allow tiny stolon-tip plantlets to root close by.

Other plant species also proliferate via such “chickens”, e.g. Chlorophytum comosum, another South African plant that goes by the hen-and-chickens vernacular name.

When observing such a stand, it is therefore not known which plants are (or were) connected by stolons as opposed to having grown from seed. Slight genetic differences may be displayed by the seed plants, not by the stolon-generated ones (Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2010; iSpot).