Panda plant

Panda Plant, Kalanchoe tomentosa, is a close relative of Mother of Thousands.  It’s called a Panda Plant because the leaves are very very fuzzy and have red tips and they supposedly resemble panda toes.  Though both pandas and Panda Plants are very cute, I do not think there is any real resemblance.

Baby panda

Mother of Thousands can propogate rapidly with little plantlets on the edge of their leaves.  Panda Plants can also propogate from their leaves – but they only make one plantlet per leaf and they only do it if the leaf is in contact with the soil.  It’s still pretty cool, though.  When most plants lose a leaf, the leaf dies.  When a Panda Plant loses a leaf, it clones itself.

This is how my Panda Plant got started.  Mine is a bit leggier than most because it doesn’t get enough sunshine.

Mother of Thousands

I promised to show you pictures of my plants a few weeks ago.  I’ve taken pictures of a few of them, but not all.  The weather has been so strange here and is making picture taking difficult.

This plant is a Mother of Thousands, a kind of Kalanchoe. It forms little plantlets on its leaves – you can see a few in this picture – and then drops them.  It’s incredible the number of little clones this plant makes in just a few months.

I started this mother of thousands from a plantlet about a year and a half ago.