Flower Friday: Chinese Money Plant

Several months ago Son#3's partner gave us a little Chinese Money Plant - she'd been propagating them and wanted us to have one. For a while it faltered and we thought it might die, but my Editor replanted it in a bigger pot and since then it's thrived and grown a lot. One day I'll blip a photo of the whole of it.

The other day, however, my Editor noticed that it was starting to flower so this is a macro photo of the tiny flower buds (the photo is focus stacked: on this occasion I was lazy and just used the automated focus stack function built into the Olympus camera). Each bud is less than 1mm across and the whole stem shown in the photo is only just over 1cm long. As and when the buds open it'll probably appear on my blip journal again. The plant has a variety of names, including the missionary plant, lefse plant, pancake plant, UFO plant, or just pilea (short for its scientific name of Pilea peperomioides). It's originally from the southwestern Yunnan province of China. Popular lore maintains that a Norwegian missionary, Agnar Espegren, took cuttings home with him in the 1940s, and shared them with friends and family. Those plants were spread throughout Scandinavia, and eventually the world, as people passed cutting between friends.

There's more info about it here; sadly the plant doesn't actually grow money!   ;-))

Many thanks, as ever, to BikerBear Anni for hosting Flower Friday.