Small Haworthia with stacked leaves that form narrow, tall rosettes. Leaves are marked with many raised white tubercles on the underside. Stems branch at the base (or higher up, if there is injury to the growth point) and form sprawling clumps in old age. This plant is very well behaved in small(ish) containers, given good drainage and strong light, but not necessarily a lot of direct sun. Ridiculously easy to start from cuttings. A single plant in an 8 inch pot can provide dozens of cuttings to start new plants over the course of several years without needing more space or any kind of soil replacement.

This species occurs in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa near Grahamstown. It is very similar to H. coarctata (formerly a subspecies and variety of reinwardtii) and occurs mostly to its east. The two species may be difficult to tell apart but reinwartdtii tends to have larger, whiter, flatter tubercles (but this feature is variable).

The ratio of leaf width to stem width is supposed to be helpful for telling reinwardtii (1.2) from coarctata (1.7).

Reply to this comment

A word of warning, or assistance, if you're trying to find database pages for variants or forms of what used to be called Haworthia reinwardtii. In 2013, when the new genus Haworthiopsis was created from a subset of Haworthia species, the mother species Haworthia reinwardtii became Haworthiopsis reinwardtii, BUT only some of its variants were similarly reclassified as Haworthiopsis reinwardtii. Other variants were subsumed into the genus Haworthiopsis coarctata, sometimes, but not always, keeping the variant-specific name. An example is Haworthia reinwardtii var. adelaidensis becoming Haworthiopsis coarctata var. adelaidensis, but Haworthia reinwardtii f. olivacea becoming Haworthiopsis reinwardtii f. olivacea.

This is but a small sample of the confusing renaming/reclassification that has recently taken place among species that used to be in the Haworthia genus. The point of this comment is to alert people who are trying to find database pages for some form or variant of what once was called Haworthia reinwardtii that they should now, at a minimum, look at all the entries both for Haworthiopsis reinwardtii and Haworthiopsis coarctata. Be warned, also, that the database entries don't have complete lists of all the taxonomic synonyms attached to a given accepted binomial, so searching the database won't always produce the desired 'hit', whereas viewing the lists of all entries under the mother species names might help you find what you're looking for.

Reply to this comment