Elephant Bush (Portulacaria afra)

I've killed too many of these plants, and they usually die during the height of summer. I've always figured I was watering them to death, letting them get rained on too much but I saw one in an office a couple of days ago that made me wonder if I've just fried them to death.

The plant I saw was on a shelf between waist & chest level, on a west wall near a big south-facing window. I asked about it & the person said the sun hits it for around 30 minutes early in the day. Didn't have my phone with me to take a pic but this plant looked great, with a lot of branches & foliage. The person said it has been there for about 6 mos & has more than doubled in size . Now I want to try one more time and keep it mostly in the shade. I loved the leaning look of the plant I saw.

I would love to see pics of these plants out there, and hear about their conditions.

purpleinopp said: Elephant Bush (Portulacaria afra)

I've killed too many of these plants, and they usually die during the height of summer. I've always figured I was watering them to death, letting them get rained on too much but I saw one in an office a couple of days ago that made me wonder if I've just fried them to death.

The plant I saw was on a shelf between waist & chest level, on a west wall near a big south-facing window. I asked about it & the person said the sun hits it for around 30 minutes early in the day. Didn't have my phone with me to take a pic but this plant looked great, with a lot of branches & foliage. The person said it has been there for about 6 mos & has more than doubled in size . Now I want to try one more time and keep it mostly in the shade. I loved the leaning look of the plant I saw.

I would love to see pics of these plants out there, and hear about their conditions.

My variegata is doing fine. Semi shade, think thats how most desert plants start their lives.

I will try and take pictures of mine later today, but I have seen these grown in full sun here in pots on garden edge brick low fence walls year round.

So while I am sure you can fry these, it would seem that they can take quite a lot of heat and sun in what I would not call ideal conditions. Those were not my plants so I cannot provide how the people that grew them were treating them watering wise, but I suspect they water them a lot especially in summer.

I have two that I inherited from some friends who moved away to South Africa (one day I will get to visit them, one day), I must admit I was not really that interested in them, but no matter what I did - lots of neglect, lots of water, more sun, less sun - the pots literally got shoved around my back yard to make space for plants I cared more about - they did not die. When I moved to my current place in 2019, I moved them with me and decided that given their persistence I'd actually give them some attention, which included repotting in one case and some clean up in the other case. Both plants had a lot of dead chunks in them but they are now doing fine. One grows in a hanging basket and the other in a largish shallow pot that sits on a raised stand. I grow both on my mostly enclosed small south facing front porch - this means that it gets really hot there most times of the year, but they do not see direct sun in the summer (sun angle is too high). I water them with all my other plants so usually about once a week in summer and much less the rest of the year, but when I water them I water them a lot.

with the above.
About watering. This species is fairly tolerant of overwatering. Just treat it as any other succulent.

Thank you for the replies & anecdotes. I can see myself trying this again.

In my garden, it stays outdoors year round too. But it does get some afternoon dappled light/shade during the peak of summer to fall, since that is the time the canopy of our city trees will be alive. During winter, it gets rained on, but rain here is quite light and intermittent, if it even manages to come at all. And good timing, just when my succulents need more light and warmth, city trees are asleep so it gets all the light and warmth during the short daytime.

I would say it is quite heat and drought tolerant even at summer's peak when we easily hit over 100F, so knowing that, I can water them a bit more generously before the sun hits it. Just so dry here by then so they do not get overwatered, plus I have already made sure they are growing in a porous, well draining media.

I think it may not like having very humid environment, so you may have to run a fan a lot to assist better airflow around it.

My succulents are outdoors, so always lots of light and air around them.

I remember having similar problems growing succulents in my homeland. Just too humid, so easy to catch fungal issues since it rains a lot there. Even grown indoors on the sunniest side..just so hard to do it...when I came back here in Cali, I realized that humidity aspect is quite significant. Over there it was almost always 80% to 100% humidity, while here it is 35% to 0% at summer's peak.

I have seen some growers there literally growing the plants in rocky substrate, otherwise, they will end up with dead succulents.
But this is more for the desert type succulents.

Portulacaria afra is from South Africa..so got to remember that type of growing area..how arid it can get there, their long dry season which is similar here in Cali..runs 6 to 7 monrhs dry.

Thank you, Tarev. If humidity is a problem, this plant is not going to stay alive inside or outside of my house.

You can try running your fan often and make sure your media is very gritty. Like 80% pumice and 20% cacti mix.

I would think an extra gritty mix as Tarev suggests might be the antidote to the summer blues.

Our humidity averages about 70% with regular nighttime fog, and that plant is really common locally. It enjoys day long sun in our mild climate and will bonsai a bit in containers, more so if the container is too small or the plant has been in it too long. But if I had to make a short list of bulletproof, sun-loving container succulents in our climate, this would be on it, along with the jade. Especially drought tolerant, especially tolerant of neglect, especially tolerant of size constraints.As a landscape plant it goes on autopilot. If somebody here needed a succulent hedge and didn't mind doing a fair amount of pruning, I'd recommend this plant.

So maybe there's something about heat and humidity combined, especially with lots of rain. Our summers are cool, without a drop of rain. One would expect the times of heightened sensitivity to occur on the hottest days but especially when it does not cool down at night. Those would be times when the plant will theoretically be most refractory to excess water. That is when you might avoid watering and/or provide overhead protection to keep the plant out of the rain.

Thank you very much. By cool down at night, do you mean below about 77-82°? That's the usual low here during the warmer part of the year.

Here is how my plant looks like: container is shallow and wide enough




This is the top part of one of the branches that wants to cascade..so I just have an extra container with gritty mix to catch it..I am hoping it will root too.

Conditions outside, very hot and dry.
Garden thermometer as sun hits it:



Other garden sensor is now in some shade and this is its reading:



Thankfully that 100F + reading is just for the next half hour...in summer it will be a daily 6 to 7 hours duration.

purpleinopp said: Thank you very much. By cool down at night, do you mean below about 77-82°? That's the usual low here during the warmer part of the year.

Yeah, maybe. I think Thijs would be better able to answer this question for you.

That looks wonderful on a clearly oppressive day!

I love this plant from the database too:

I wish that during the site update they made the uploading of pictures easier, like a drag and drop upload...

Anyway, here are pictures of my two. They have been OK during our hot at night parts of the year, when it is generally 85 as a low, and frequently even hotter for a few weeks of the year. This tends to coincide with 'high' humidity, but for AL it would probably not be that high.
I think the well draining soil is important, and just checking carefully how fast the pots dry out before watering more. My front porch is enclosed on three sides and roofed so there is not a lot of airflow, but as you can see in both cases the pot is open to airflow from all directions so they probably dry out pretty quickly.

Thank you, Thijs. Those plants are magnificent!

Thank you, Tiffany.

I wish I could give you a better set of care suggestions, but I do not do anything special, maybe an extra splash in between regular weekly waterings at the height of summer. I have a ZZ plant and another former indoor plant (banned outside because of a bad spider mite infestation and initially left to die, but it refused to do that), that I forget the name of at the moment, on the same front porch, which get very thirsty in summer and thus tend to get watered twice a week and on some of those days I will give these some water as well, but not always.

Photos from the patio and the public garden here... both plants in nearly day-long sun.




The first plant (started from a large cutting) gets water weekly and actually drinks quite a lot (1 gallon). The second plant gets a bit of water every 2 weeks, mostly from plants around it that I have watered (I don't actually water it directly at all). I think it needs reduction, by about 50%, soon.

Note the trailing and upright forms of this species are different plants, not different behaviors of the same plant.

Baja_Costero said: Photos from the patio and the public garden here... both plants in nearly day-long sun.




The first plant (started from a large cutting) gets water weekly and actually drinks quite a lot (1 gallon). The second plant gets a bit of water every 2 weeks, mostly from plants around it that I have watered (I don't actually water it directly at all). I think it needs reduction, by about 50%, soon.

Note the trailing and upright forms of this species are different plants, not different behaviors of the same plant.

Hmm..it does both ways of growing on my side..maybe due to the awkward light angle my plant gets as the day progresses.

Yes you're right it's possible for an upright plant to also grow sideways. The landscape P. afra above is doing just that, and under low light conditions it's probably much more likely. But the trailing version has weak stems in even the strongest light, and ends up more like a groundcover than a bush when it's in the ground. Some people (like Altman Plants) call the trailing form prostrata to distinguish it.

Elephant Bush (Portulacaria afra 'Prostrata')