Crassula aquatica
A tiny annual stonecrop relative that forms thin mats of millimetre-long leaves on wet mud and sand, not a desert succulent. It grows on open shorelines of lakes and tidal rivers, in freshwater to brackish marshes and in vernal pools across the cool temperate and boreal Northern Hemisphere. At home it is best treated as a short-lived annual for a sunny bog pot, aquarium edge or paludarium, grown from seed each year.
Where it grows wild
It colonises bare, periodically flooded mud and sand: lake and pond shores exposed as water levels fall, tidal freshwater and brackish river flats, salt marsh edges and California vernal pools. It germinates underwater or on saturated mud, grows partly submerged or just emerged, flowers and sets seed as the ground is exposed, then dies. Plants range from yellow-green to red or purple, redder in strong sun.
GBIF elevations run from 1 to 2080 m, median 150 m, but only 33 of 787 records carry one. Most populations are lowland shorelines; the high records are probably Mexican or Sierra Nevada pools.
🔒 Growing it like that
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 2.0 licence, unmodified.