Bear's paw

Description

Cotyledon tomentosa is a species of flowering plant in the family Crassulaceae, native to South Africa. It is a succulent evergreen shrub with large chunky ovate fuzzy green leaves. Its autonymous subspecies is known as the bear's paw because of the prominent "teeth" at the tips of its leaves. It forms large orange bell-shaped flowers in spring. In its native habitat, the Little Karoo region of South Africa, cotyledons usually grow in rocky quartz fields where they have excellent drainage provided by very porous soil. Cotyledon tomentosa is a perennial evergreen shrub, which is a member of the Crassulaceae family of succulent flowering plants. C. tomentosa has red, orange, or yellow bell-shaped flowers between July and September, and there are two recognized subspecies, subsp. tomentosa and subsp. ladismithiensis. C. tomentosa subsp. tomentosa, the autonymous subspecies, is a small, freely branched shrublet that grows to 70 cm tall. It has chunky green tomentose leaves that are oblanceolate to oblong, with 3-8 reddish teeth at the end.The other subspecies, subsp. ladismithiensis, features long cylindrical leaves that generally do not have teeth. Subsp. ladismithiensis also tends to be smaller and less branched than subsp. tomentosa. Finally, subsp. ladismithiensis has brown peeling bark, compared to the green hairy branches of subsp. tomentosa. Cotyledon tomentosa was described in 1862 by William Henry Harvey, and has no synonyms. Cotyledon tomentosa subsp. ladismithiensis was first described in 1907 by botanist Selmar Schonland, who named it Cotyledon heterophylla. Schonland noted that C. heterophylla seemed "more robust than C. tomentosa, Harv. to which it is probably nearly allied." Schonland also cautioned that the differences he noted between C. heterophylla and C. tomentosa "to be used with great caution" as "relative characters in the genus Cotyledon are frequently inconstant. "However, the name C. heterophylla was a nomen illegitimum, because it had already been applied in 1824 by William Roxburgh to what is now called Kalanchoe lanceolata.