Dressed in rain gear and pressing down on my ballcap to keep it from blowing away on this blustery Leap Day, I almost walked right past these blooming yellow plants without noticing something different about them.... Besides the September shot above, they're also in a picture from early December, and they weren't blooming then, either.
Apparently these natives of the Canary Islands are in the genus Aeonium (Greek for "ageless"), and these are probably A. arboreum or A. canariense. On Wikipedia they are given the oh-so-common name of tree houseleeks: the Anglo-Saxon word leac means plant, so they are basically called Tree Houseplants. They're in the Crassulaceae, same as our stonecrops.
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