NO offense to the rest of the country, but there's something so Eastern about Christmas, so Hallmark special, so Anne Heche on ice skates, dusted with snowflakes. To enjoy just how different Christmas is in California, witness the jade plant. Across most of the country, it is a houseplant, whose needs extend little beyond a sunny spot on a window ledge, the occasional drink of water and a light pass with a feather duster.
Here in Southern California, it is a garden shrub, capable of becoming a 6- to 15-foot-tall tree, our very own Christmas tree, which every December is crowned by a cloud of tiny white flowers.
Jade has been loaded with so many associations that another could scarcely hurt it. Of all the plants brought to Los Angeles from all over the world, few other imports have survived the waxing and waning of our enthusiasms with quite the same stoicism.
Jade is a Blanche du Bois: It depends on the kindness of strangers. It cannot reproduce without a curious gardener taking a cutting and planting it. One way it won't spread is by seed. So much of the jade in America came from cuttings from the same plant, that even if bees visit the flowers and spread the pollen, it is highly unlikely that there will be any viable seed. Jade is not self-fertile.
Currently, it seems that jade's curiosity value is low. It's not uncommon to see great clumps of it tossed on parkways after a house is sold and a new owner decides to start over. "Californians are jaded about jade," remarks John Trager, curator of desert collections at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens. Trager, himself a jade admirer, remarks on the sculptural lines of the plant and the translucence of the leaves -- its ability to capture and hold light, in essence to glow every dawn and dusk.
It seems to suffer from nonspecific exoticism. The tendency of plant collectors to put jade in china pots and prune it into extreme forms has given it a reputation for being a bonsai plant. There are all kinds of wishful notions about it being a "money" plant (which it is for canny nursery owners). Trager says the strongest connotation in California seems to be with 1960s housing tracts and a Jetsons-era look. Jade would be the new hedge when we went to Ralphs in a space jet.
In fact, jade is from the Eastern Cape of South Africa, an area bordering land that has a climate nearly identical to that of Southern California. Long before the ecology of plants that adapted to arid summers was well understood, jade was plucked from South Africa and whisked off to Europe by tall-ship botanists. By the mid-18th century, the shrub "umxhalagube" had made it to Europe and been renamed according to the emerging Linnaean classification system of the day. The genus became Crassula, the species ovata, meaning "thick" and "egg-shaped," in both cases referring to the leaves.
AS the American West opened up, bringing succulents to California was like bringing coal to Newcastle. We already had agaves and cactuses. The state needed citrus, stone fruit, alfalfa. In his book "Desert Gardens," horticulturist Gary Lyons found California nurserymen slowly working with American succulents from the early 19th century, particularly before water was funneled in from the Owens Valley. Then in the 1930s, he says, South African desert plants, including jade, euphorbias and aloes, began spicing up the succulent trade. The result: a long, if never dominant, tradition in California of landscaping with succulents, and the spangling up and down the state of otherworldly gardens, including the Desert Garden at the Huntington.
Because of the vagaries of fashion, Lyons worries about the future of these, particularly the privately owned ones. There is so much more to the plants than style. Their sculpted fortitude has much to teach us about the workings of nature, he thinks. Standing in the Desert Garden at the Huntington, where he has worked as curator since 1965, he stares at a 5-foot jade plant in full flower and says, "The interesting question is: How did it get that way? What does it mean?"
In the case of jade, it means that this South African import endured similar if not identical environmental pressures as our Western natives did: scorching summers and little summer water other than marine layers settling as dew. Unlike porous broad-leafed plants, many succulents protect against water loss by closing the pores in their leaves during the day. Only at night do they open the pores to take in carbon dioxide for photosynthesis. In extremely dry conditions, they will keep the pores shut at night too.
Something about South Africa created not just jade, but half of the 300 or so species that make up the \o7Crassula\f7 genus. They look wild, like sea anemones, fungi, sponges -- often blobby and beautiful.
