Description
Lithops lesliei is among the easiest species to grow and is available in several distinct subspecies, variety and cultivated forms. It looks like a flowering brain, with a big, umbrella-shaped daisy flower taking its nourishment from the frontal lobes. It grows solitary or in small clumps of 1 to 10 paired leaves (mostly 2 to 5) up to 5 cm wide (often more in cultivation)
Stem: Almost stemless.
Roots: It has soft rootstocks.
Bodies (paired leaves): quite large 2-4 cm wide. Each plant consists of a pair of extremely thick and equally or slightly unequally sized leaves fused together and separated by a shallow fissure (2-5 mm) with conjuncted lobes. The bodies are shaped like a truncate inverse, grey-green to buff, cone, flattened to slightly convex in its upper portion. The top of the leaves is elliptic to slightly reniform and varies considerably in colour depending on the substrate of origin; the colours comprises Yellow/brown, greyish/yellow, orange, rust, grey, grey/white, dark coffee, with a fine lacework of greenish-brown spots, tracing and furrows. Despite the variability in colour, the shape of this species is relatively uniform and generally recognizable by its mainly green windows or channels, and very irregular rust-brown islands with numerous mini-windows and fairly narrow, distinct and irregular margins
Flowers: A single medium to very large yellow (or rarely white) daisy-like flower emerges from the fissure and is as large as the pair of fleshy leaves below. About 3-5 cm wide, diurnal.
Blooming season: From mid-summer through fall.
Seeds: light to dark brown, very fine.
Origin and Habitat
20 km NW of Kimberley, South Africa
Lithops lesliei is one of the species with the larger distribution, ranging in a broad band from the Free state to western Transvaal. The form C36 comes from the typical locality near Warrenton, Northern Cape (SA)
Habitat: It grows in areas where summer rains are common and often heavy, the plants are often found growing in gravel pockets amongst grasses. Substrate in alkaline pans and conglomeritic sandstone, brown siltstone, quartzite, ferruginuous quartzite, lava,white calcite. The plants mimic the small rocks that surround them.
Cultivation and Propagation
Lithops lesliei is a summer growing species with dry rest period over winter. Easy to grow it tolerates a degree more excess water than some particular hydrophobic species, even so it must have a very open mineral, fast draining mix with little compost and a hight degree of grit, coarse sand, small lava gravel or pebbles. Give them the maximum amount of light you are able to give them, but care should be taken about exposing them to the full blast of the sun rays in summer. Such tiny plants can easily get scorched or broiled and their appearance spoiled (this may not matter in the wild, where the Lithops have probably shrunk into the ground and becomes covered with sands).
The basic cultivation routine is: Stop watering after flowering. Start watering after the old leaves completely dry. (Usually late March or Early April) Water freely during the growing season, soak the compost fully but allow it to dry out between waterings, no water when cold. Some growers fertilize frequently, some hardly ever. Keep them dry during the winter. Nearly all problems occur as a result of overwatering and poor ventilation especially when weather conditions are dull and cool or very humid. If too much water is supplied the plants will grow out of character, bloat, split and rot. Keep them in small pots as solitary clumps or as colonies in large, shallow terracotta seed pans.
Notes: After flowering in the autumn and extending through winter season the plant doesn’t need watering, but they will still be growing, the new bodies will be increasing in size extracting water from the outer succulent leaves, allowing them to shrivel away. In fact the plant in this time extracts water and nutrient stored in the outer succulent leaves, allowing them to dehydrate relocating the water to the rest of the plant and to the new leaves that form during this period until the old leaves are reduced to nothing more than “thin papery shells”.