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Ice Plant
14 March 2024
As a kid, ice plant was no friend. There's a steep embankment behind the housing development we lived in that was, in those days, covered in the stuff. It's a low maintenance, drought-resistant ground cover.
Ice Plant. Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max back triple camera at 6.9mm, f1.8, 14049 seconds and ISO 64. Processed in Adobe Camera Raw.
That's right. No water and it occasionally blooms. Perfect solution.
Unless, like kids everywhere, you have to scramble over it to get to the road. Forget it.
You sink into it as its succulent greens collapse under your weight. And when they release their moisture, you start to slip. Like a tire spinning in the mud.
We learned other ways to get to the road and over to the lake where the great impediment wasn't ice plant but reeds.
But we've never gotten over our life-long dislike of ice plant. So when we came across this brilliant specimen on a recent jaunt through the neighborhood the last thing that would have occurred to us is that it's ice plant.
It was just too spectacular.
All the ice plant we've ever known (like that stuff at Thorton Beach) has been purple with yellow pistils. We'd never seen the orange variety.
And this particular clump was so dense with blooms we didn't notice the succulents hiding underneath.
Fortunately for both this ice plant and us, we were already on the road this time and didn't have to scramble over it.
Instead we took a few photographs and continued on our way.