Moss Rose

Pune, Maharashtra · nature

Pink portulaca scattered across dry red earth, the leaves needle-thin and the flowers drinking the late sun. A tough succulent doing its best impression of a wildflower.

Portulaca grandiflora is sold at every Indian nursery as 'moss rose' or 'nine o'clock flower' — the latter because the blooms only open in direct sunlight, around mid-morning, and close again by afternoon. The leaves are succulent and needle-like, designed for dry beds and full sun, and the plant will spread across a bare patch of soil within a single season.

This patch had taken over the corner of a garden bed where the gardener had stopped watering. The pink was almost fluorescent in the late sun, and the flowers were arranged with the casual symmetry that succulents do better than any other family. I took the photograph as a documentary of a small successful colonisation — a plant doing exactly what it was bred to do, in conditions slightly worse than ideal, looking better than the bedding plants in the next bed over that were getting twice the care. Tough plants are honest plants. They don't pretend to need anything they don't.

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