"Le Jade du désert"

Le jade du désert is what CHM called this plant when he brought to San Francisco a cutting from one that he had growing in his yard in Salton City, California, in the Southern California desert when I lived there. Less than a year later, Walt and I decided to leave San Francisco and move to France.

I asked CHM if we could come and stay at his house for two or three days before we started the long cross-country drive to North Carolina, where we would spent as much time as necessary with my mother while waiting for our long-stay visas to be approved and delivered. Then we would continue on to France. I also asked him if I could bring him my "desert jade" plant, which had grown quite a bit over the 18 months it lived with us in SF. CHM said he would be very happy to have the plant, because his had died a few months earlier. Anyway, I couldn't bring it to France.

Walt and I moved to France in 2003 and settled in. In 2004, Charles-Henry came to France to spend the summer in Paris. He asked if he could come visit us to see our house and the Saint-Aignan area. I said of course he could. He surprised me when he arrived carrying a cutting from his "desert jade" plant. I've had it growing here ever since. Actually, I have a few of the plants because I keep taking cuttings and planting them in pots.

The plant's scientific name is Portulacaria afra, and it's not really a jade at all but resembles one. In southern Africa it's called "elephant bush" because elephants graze on it there. The one above is one I grew in the house here for a couple of years. It grew tall and leggy. I don't know why. Last summer we set it outdoors on the front terrace and this is what it turned into. Now we have it spending the winter in the house once again, and it seems to be happy living near a radiator and a west-facing window.