Mother of Thousands

A tall block wrapped in a banana leaf, and rising from it two leaves opening like wings. Their edges are not smooth. Each is lined, all the way round, with tiny beads of green.

Those beads are the point. The plant is kalanchoe, called mother of thousands, and every notch along its leaves carries a small plantlet, complete with its own roots, ready to drop and begin again wherever it lands. In Japan it is kodakara-sō, the plant of treasured children. What looks like decoration is a whole generation waiting at the edge.

It is easy to measure a life by what stands at its centre — the career, the house, the one great work. But what we pass on is usually carried at the edges: the habits someone learned by watching us, the kindnesses repeated, the small ways of doing things that take root in other people long after we have forgotten them.

Perhaps every edge carries a small beginning.