Neat plant. It would look funny if you put little shoes on the tips of the leaves!
Amy

Great idea Amy. Do you have a miniature cobbler's bench?
Ah! I bet I've not used the word 'cobbler' in many years.

Al

It might be worth mentioning the scale, Al. I'm guessing you'd need some pretty tiny shoes! There are still officially a handful of Mitrophyllum species, possibly more published very recently. This looks a lot like a bilobe Conophytum to me, but then I don't have any Mitrophyllums :) The flowers look like bilobe flowers too. It would help to see the base of the plant and the "stem" structure, which could be quite distinctive on a Mitrophyllum. Also, do you know if it displays two different leaf forms at different times of the year? Do you have a species name for it?

Yikes! How did I miss the name? Mitrophyllum obtusipetalum

I'll watch the leaves throughout the next few months and see if I cannot produce a current digital shot of the body tomorrow. I might already have one from today's shoot.

All comments greatly appreciated.

Al

Are the old dried-up leaves removable or do you leave them on for effect? It's an attractive plant and I rather like the way the old leaves remain on the base of each one and accumulate over time.

I can't seem to remove the old leaves from my Pleiospilos nellii for fear of damaging the succulent leaves, but they gradually become unnoticeable as each new pair grows. I guess removing them is a matter of taste and I just leave mine alone.

Amy

Mitrophyllum obtusipetalum is an obsolete name but I don't know what current name it corresponds to. There is (was) a Conophytum obtusipetalum but it is a kind of C. wettsteinii and is completely different from your plant, so just a coincidence I think. I think Mitrophyllum, as currently defined, are all highly dimorphic with a big fat pair of leaves followed by a longer thinner pair, often on quite tall, sometimes even caudiciform, stems. Your plant looks more like a bilobe Conophytum. I believe that no Conophytum are dimorphic.

Amy, I tend to remove as much of the old leaves as possible, simply because they are a hiding place for pests and a resting place for water. Here's a very old C. bilobum that I received and then tidied up. The different angles exaggerate the effect but the tidied-up plant does look quite spindly on those stalks. But it was worth it, there was a mealy in there, possibly dead, and water still remaining from two days earlier. The second picture was taken a couple of days later and the breaking dormancy is quite dramatic.

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A more complete view of the plant, captured this morning. An increasingly lower sun in the sky produces troublesome shadows. Indoor shots with a back light might be a solution to that problem. (That's another topic.)

Al

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you just have to love those amazing mesembs

Those are dramatic before and after shots Ian. Thanks for answering my question. I am gaining interest in these plants and am trying to learn all I can before venturing into them too far! I've got quite a few coming to me in the mail soon and I'm preparing.
Amy

And our guru placed those pics side by side. I'm printing out all these instructions and the like. Some day I hope they make a lot of sense to me. I certainly like the results.

Al