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Lithops meyeri Vlakmyn
This is one of the more fascinating and intriguing species with milky-grey tones and obscurely perceptible cloudy blue hue.
 

Description: Lithops meyeri is easily recognizable for its almost uniform milky-grey or pale grey-green colour and for the dichotomous leaves that tend to be more spread apart, even when new leaves not growing in. It is a medium species, up to 35 X 24 mm, usually about 27 X 18 mm with up to 5 or more heads (mostly 2-4)
Cole numbers:  C212, C272, C273.
Body (paired leaves): Characteristically bicuneate, the lobes are disjunct with a deep fissure and distinctly divergent. Profile opaque smooth.
Faces: The top surface is flat to somewhat convex and usually somewhat elevated, often with one side of the face lower than the other. Face elongated elliptic, sometimes slightly reniform; lobes more or less equal. Windows cloudy and only obscurely perceptible . Profile opaque, or occasionally very obscurely transluscent; smooth. Margins indistinctly suffused with somehow lighter colour. Channels, island and rubrications usually usually absent, occasionally visible as indistinct cloudy forms in the windows. opaque pale whitish grey tinged with cream, yellow, milky green or pink. The colour of the margins and face island comprises pale milky-grey tinged with blue, green, pink or cream. Shoulders and inner faces of fissures opaque.
Flowers: Yellow with white centre up to 40 mm in diameter.
Fruit: Capsules 5-6 locular.
Seeds: Light brown.
Blooming season: Flowers appear in late-autumn.

Cultivars:

• Lithops hookeri cv' Hammeruby'  Cole number C272A
  This is a red mutant form, found in habitat by Steven Hammer (hence the name). Only a single specimen was found among thousands of normally fairly plain grey-green plants. This plant has a very distictive opaque sherbet-carmin colour vaguely remembering of L. optica rubra, but in all other respects the same as the type. This plant is very rare because it appears to rarely come true from seed and also it is quite difficult to grow and to keep alive. Even from red parents there don't seem to be many red seedlings. Usually most of the seedlings appears normally grey-green coloured and only a few (about 5%) shows hints of pink and very rarely a proper bright red plant. Hammeruby has a long way to go, with successive line breeding, before it is stabilized to the level of optica rubra. The red ones are difficult to raise from seed as they are much smaller and slower than the normal shades and are best grown separately.

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Scientific name:  Lithops meyeri L. Bolus 1932

Origin: Endemic to a small area in the Richtersveld, to the north and north-west of Lekkersing.
TL: Namaqualand: Richtersveld, Brakfontein'

Habitat: Grow in among small quartzite stones. Colours of the background white, with some yellow-brown, brown and black. it is a quartz lover and will always be found growing either on big outcrops of quartz or more commonly on quartz plains where the quartz pebbles protect the plants from the blazing summer sun by reflecting a lot of the light and heat.  It closely resembles the white quartz crystalline rubble of its habitat.  In times of drought the plants shrivel and are almost invisible, as they get covered with fine wind-blown sand.  After rain, however, they absorb water and become fat and turgid.

Etymology: Named after Pastor G. Meyer who collected this plant in January 1930.

Cultivation: Need an open mineral, fast draining mix and the maximum amount of light you are able to give them. The basic cultivation routine is: Stop watering after flowering. Start watering after the old leaves completely dry. (Usually late March or Early April) Water freely during the growing season, soak the compost fully but allow it to dry out between waterings, no water when cold. Some growers fertilize frequently, some hardly ever. Keep them dry during the winter. Nearly all problems occur as a result of overwatering and poor ventilation especially when weather conditions are dull and cool or very humid. This plant is best for a well lit area (Bright shade to full sun).

Note: After flowering in the autumn and extending through winter season the plant doesn’t need watering, but they will still be growing, the new bodies will be increasing in size extracting water from the outer succulent leaves, allowing them to shrivel away.  In fact the plant in this time extracts water and nutrient stored in the outer succulent leaves, allowing them to dehydrate relocating the water  to the rest of the plant and to the new leaves that form during this period until the old leaves are reduced to nothing more than "thin papery shell".

All the information and photos in cactus art files are now available also in the new the Encyclopaedia of Succulents. We hope you find this new site informative and useful.