gaping cleft

More flower buds are coming but if I keep posting about that I'll never get to write about my other beloved plants. :)

This is not an angry monkey face! It is the bunch of L. fulviceps v. lactinea C222 from March 2009.

Aren't they cute? :) Pretty color, lovely dots and all. But what's with the cleft? Well, I didn't know until I read about it in 'Lithops - Flowering Stones' by D. & N. Cole (review yet to come). Apparently this belongs to lithops abnormalities and is called "gaping fissure type". It "does no harm to the plant which usually produces a normal body the following season".

All three of these fulvies had gaping clefts in 2009 and one outgrew its "condition" it seems. But I don't mind them being like that at all. There's another one, a hookeri, in my humble collection, and it is really interesting to see the new leaves developing in there even though it'll take months until they actually get out.