Fairy Tale Plant

Description

Tylecodon buchholzianus is a species of succulent plant in the genus Tylecodon belonging to the family Crassulaceae. Tylecodon buchholzianus is a shrub reaching a height of about 20–30 cm. It is a winter slow-growing plant, dormant during the summer. The stem is a swollen and thickened caudex with a diameter up to 30 cm and many elongate whitish or grey branches. In the Spring arise almost cylindrical green leaves, about 10 cm long, but the photosynthesis may be granted also by microscopic leaflets on the stem. Flowers are pale pink, have recurved lobes and emerge from tubes on short petioles. Flowering period extends from January to late Spring. This species is native to Namaqualand in South Africa and Namibia Tylecodon is a genus of succulent plants in the family Crassulaceae, native to southern Africa. Until the late 1970s all these plants were included in the genus Cotyledon, but in 1978 Helmut Toelken of the Botanical Research Institute, Pretoria, split them off into a genus of their own. The grounds for splitting Cotyledon to create the new genus included certain features of the flowers, but more conspicuously, the leaves of Tylecodon are deciduous in summer and they are borne in a spiral arrangement, rather than the opposite, decussate arrangement of Cotyledon leaves. The species are very varied, ranging from dwarf succulents such as Tylecodon reticulatus to Tylecodon paniculatus, which may exceed two metres in height. The new name Tylecodon was apparently chosen as a syllabic anagram of the earlier name Cotyledon. Tylecodon species are poisonous. Some of them are sufficiently hazardous to livestock to constitute an economic problem for stock farmers. Concerns also have been expressed on potential risks to collectors who handle the plants carelessly. The various species and even individual plants do however vary greatly in toxicity. The best-known active ingredients of Tylecodon species are bufadienolides biochemically related to toad venoms and bile acids. In some species more than half a dozen such compounds have been identified. As such they are nervous and muscle poisons that cause various cardiac symptoms. In livestock they cause various forms of the condition known as krimpsiekte, meaning "contraction" or "shrinking" disease. The meat of poisoned animals is dangerous to dogs or humans that eat it.