Aloe broomii
The mountain or snake aloe is a robust, usually solitary aloe from the dry interior highlands of South Africa and Lesotho, instantly recognised by its long 'snake' inflorescence in which the flowers are hidden behind large bracts. It grows on rocky hillsides at roughly 1000–2000 m in the Karoo and southern Highveld, where summers are warm with thunderstorms and winters are dry, frosty and sometimes snowy. In cultivation it wants full sun, a gritty mix and a dry, cold winter.
Where it grows wild
Rocky slopes, ridges and koppies in Nama Karoo, Karoo escarpment grassland and escarpment thicket, often on shale and dolerite or ironstone. Specimen and observation notes describe hill slopes with stony, well-drained soil in full sun.
Literature gives about 1000–2000 m; a herbarium label near Middelburg (Eastern Cape) records 1386 m. Our measured data file had no usable wild records.
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The wild conditions above, turned into targets for a shelf, a tent or a greenhouse. The full profile has:
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Profiles are drafts built from measured range and climate and from published sources; each section carries its own confidence in the app. Photo from Wikimedia Commons, used under its CC BY-SA 4.0 licence, unmodified.