Crassula Ovata: Bringing in abundance
What does abundance mean to you, and how can you attract it? These were two journalling prompts a friend suggested to spark reflection at the turn of the New Year. As 2025 begins, I’ve decided I will begin my journey into writing coaching practice from a place of abundance. My natural proclivity has been to think ‘I know the first stages of setting up in business are going to be tough and I’ll struggle to be successful at first, so how can I tighten my belt, lower my overheads and economise so I bring home enough bacon?’ But what if I’ve got it all wrong? What if this new venture will provide just what I need it to? What if it surpasses my wildest dreams? What if 2025 will serve me abundantly? The desire to attract abundance is an alchemy that has probably preoccupied human beings forever – wishing for more food, shelter, and safety, then more money, a better job, better health and latterly, more time and better work-life balance. In fact, the desire to improve our own prospects and be more successful are probably things that define us. Homo Improvus perhaps? And I don’t think that’s just a white, global north perspective either. So how would it feel for me to start 2025 – launching Curious View – from a mindset of abundance, and not scarcity? And I’ve found inspiration for this from a quite magical source. A money plant, or ‘Crassula Ovata’ in Latin.
During a house move in 2003, my Mum came to help with the cleaning as we frantically stuffed the last remnants of badly packed bags and boxes into the movers’ van. “What’s this in here for?” she asked, retrieving a little plastic flowerpot from a bin bag. She held it up for me to see. A plug of dried-up earth rattled inside the pot and two wizened sticks poking up above it. “Oh, that” I said. “It’s dead Mum. One of those money plant things that I think the kids gave me for Mothers’ Day years ago.” Scraping at a stick with her fingernail Mum showed me a streak of pale green under the shrivelled exterior. “No, it’s not… that’ll come back if we re-pot it and bung it in the sun with some water” she said. And that’s just what she did when we got to our new house. And the funny thing was, that as that plant came back to life on the sunny hall bookcase, so did my family’s fortunes. My partner and I got good jobs, we could afford a brand-new car and had holidays abroad for the first time since we were students. As the good things rolled in, I began to believe that this plant did indeed hold the key to abundance as its name suggests.
Fast forward five house moves, one divorce and twenty-two years later, and that dried up old stick is now two hale and hearty Grand Dames - Crassula and Ovata – that live in our hallway and my studio respectively. Crassula is definitely in better fettle than Ovata, but it’s not all been plain sailing for either – the great overwatering of 2010, for example, meant all the succulent ‘coins’ fell off, necessitating drastic pruning back to her stumpy branches. I was convinced she was a gonner after that. But she grew back bigger than ever and I could see that her two sticks (now trunks) were in fact two plants, so when I met Drew (my now husband) in 2015, I split them into separate pots so that we could each have one in our homes while we lived apart. Spreading the good fortune as it were.
But this winter, something magical has happened to both of them. They’ve flowered for the first time ever. I didn’t even know they did flower, and apparently it can be quite tricky to get them to, because the conditions have to perfectly mimic their native South Africa for the blooms to grow. Having one would have been marvellous, but both of them? in unison? independently of one another, located as they are in different parts of the house? If that’s not a sign to trust that 2025 will be a year of abundance, I don’t know what is, and I’m taking it!