Family Tree is a project of FICTILIS, wherein we track the status and location of every new jade plant propagated from cuttings of our mother jade tree. Once every year or two, we do a selective pruning of our bonsai-trained jade. After letting the cuttings get established into young plants, we hold a little adoption ceremony and give away a new generation of baby jade plants to friends and strangers. Adopters give us brief annual status updates and photos of their plants as they grow. Participants in the project may also choose (but are not required) to follow the cuttings from their plants, allowing us to track the entire extended “family tree”.

With this project, we are sharing what we feel is a gift – the opportunity to experience the gradual growth of a low-maintenance plant over the course of a lifetime. In a strange and unexpected way, the project has become a way for us to stay connected to a pretty random group of people based on the arbitrary factor of our possessing a clone of the same jade plant, and to experience updates on the lives of these people according to a pace that feels more natural, or similar to the slow and steady growth of the succulent Crassula ovata.

For more info, see http://www.fictilis.com/family-tree.