Wa Song

Wa Song is Orostachys fimbriata, a small biennial succulent of the stonecrop family Crassulaceae often colonising the tiles of old roofs and giving rise to its English name 'rooftop pine' or 'dunce cap'. In its first year the plant forms a dense, ground-hugging rosette of fleshy, glaucous, lance-shaped to spathulate leaves with finely fringed cartilaginous tips. In its second year the rosette elongates into a conspicuous tapering spike 10 to 30 centimetres tall, densely clothed in narrower leaves and terminating in a slender, conical or pagoda-shaped raceme of small, five-petalled, whitish to pinkish flowers; the plant flowers once, sets seed, and dies. The species favours dry, exposed sites: rock crevices, sandy slopes, walls, and roof tiles across northern and central China, Korea, and Japan.