Kobus drew my attention to a glabrous plant of H. pumila while he was photographing this species at Lemoenpoort. The plants here have a missing chromosome and tend to have a purplish colour. I have seen smooth non-tubercled leaves elsewhere. But do check out that one plant – if you look carefully you can see the leaves are in 8 nearly vertical tiers. Proper botanists recently, for Taxon, described the arrangement of leaves like this in only two tiers (e.g. H. truncata) as “distichous insertion”. This is weird. Are the leaves in this plant of H. pumila “octichous”? Is H. viscosa “tristichous”. No. The leaves in the aloids are alternately and spirally inserted.

Flower profiles

Flower faces