The Wandering Jew (Tradescantia zebrina)

The story of the Wandering Jew is both very old and very stupid. I mean, I'm sorry, but there it is. It's a dumb story. There are several versions, some more pleasant than others, but they all revolve around the same basic idea: that somewhere out there, for some reason, is a Jew who has been alive since the Crucifixion of Jesus, and who has to remain alive until Jesus returns. In some versions of the story, he has no given name; in others, he's called Cartaphilus,¹ Malchus, or Ahasuerus. The connection to Jesus was kind of new in the Middle Ages, when the story really took off, but there have long been stories about people who were immortal for one reason or another, some of whom were also doomed to wander the earth.


Anyway.

The most typical version of the story² seems to be that the Jew in question goaded Jesus as he was carrying the cross to Golgotha, telling him to hurry it up, or something similar. Then Jesus, who was about to be infinitely, divinely forgiving of the sins of the entire world, turned to him and said something to the effect of, "yeah, yeah, I'm going, I'm going, and you're going to wait for me to get back, sucker." I mean, not that we wouldn't all be tempted to say something like that in Jesus's place, but come on, either you're the Son of God or you're not, right? "Forgive them, they know not what they do?" Consistent much?³

So but then the character of the Wandering Jew turns up in various spots throughout literature and movies and who knows what all else. Check the Wandering Jew FAQ if you're interested.⁴

It's hard for me to imagine Tradescantia zebrina snarking at Jesus en route to Golgotha; they seem too upbeat for that. It's also hard for me to imagine Jesus cursing and withering a Tradescantia zebrina, as far as that goes, mostly because I can't imagine anyone, Son of God or no, being able to stifle a Tradescantia zebrina for very long. I could maybe see a kind-hearted Tradescantia letting Jesus think it had been cursed, and then hurriedly regrowing once Jesus had gone on.


I assume that the reason why the story and the plant became associated with one another is that, like immortal wanderers, Tradescantia zebrina does, eventually, get everywhere. It's originally from Eastern Mexico (Tamaulipas south and east to the Yucatan), but it's been introduced all over the place since then, and can be grown as an outdoor perennial ground cover anywhere in U.S. zones 9a to 11 (One source said 8-11, even.), hardy down to about 20ºF (-7ºC).

Like its close relative Tradescantia pallida,⁵ T. zebrina has invasive potential, and is, if not actually taking over any ecosystems, at least being very closely watched. The main problems with T. zebrina are: 1) the roots are capable of sprouting new surface growth on their own, though in practice they seem not to do this all that often. 2) most pieces of an existing plant are capable of rooting and growing another plant (I'm not even sure you have to have a node, necessarily. I keep meaning to experiment with this.). 3) The stems are ridiculously brittle.⁶ Eradication, consequently, depends on one being able to collect every piece of plant from the area to be cleared. For small areas, this isn't that tough, but the bigger the patch to be cleared, the more careful you have to be. And forget about using Roundup, too. Doesn't work.

So it's like the mythical Wandering Jew at least in one respect: it will certainly still be here until the Second Coming. Whenever that might be. Whether it wants to or not.

As is usually the case, being flexible and prolific enough to be an invasive means that it's a great, easy houseplant. It's not a plant that likes to be neglected, particularly: it's more the plant I recommend to someone who's really into houseplants but has never had that many before, the plant you give to somebody who really wants to fiddle with a plant. (It's also, I'm told, useful for a lot of situations in botany classes: quick growth, quick propagation, easy to examine under a microscope because the cell layers separate easily from one another.)

LIGHT: Tradescantia zebrina can survive without much light at all, though without at least filtered sun (full sun preferred), the leaves' colors will be less intense and more green: it takes a lot of light to get the purple color.


WATER: They're fairly tolerant of both extremes, though I find that they do better if I aim to keep them pretty wet. If they're allowed to dry out regularly, the older leaves turn brown and crispy, which eventually leads to a mass of bare stems tipped with foliage. This is kind of an inevitable look anyway (see GROOMING), but keeping them more moist can slow down the process.

TEMPERATURE: Individual leaves will burn, and stems will die back, at around 32ºF (0ºC), but the plant can regrow as long as it doesn't get colder than 20ºF (-7ºC). Anywhere in your home should be fine.

HUMIDITY: Tradescantia zebrina tolerates dry air very well, in my experience, though sometimes people blame dry air for older leaves dying or burning. My personal suspicion is that this is probably either a temperature or watering issue, but I am sometimes wrong, so I'm passing this on. Take cuttings and experiment for yourself.

PESTS: I've never seen any pests on the work plants or on my own plants at home; this doesn't mean it's not possible, but they do tend to be healthy. Aphids can be an issue for plants that spend summers outside.

FEEDING: They're fast-growing, and consequently do need more food than most other indoor plants. Keep in mind, though, that if you're guessing how much food to give them, more is not automatically better. Package directions, or slightly more than package directions, should be plenty.


GROOMING/PROPAGATION: Because they grow very quickly, and because they tend to drop the lowest leaves on a stem over time, older plants often get scraggly-looking. Outdoors, this isn't a huge deal; stems grow in all directions, and if a spot is bare, a new stem will cover it up soon enough. Indoors, though, things are slower, and you do have to help the plant along a bit by starting new plants in the same pot. Propagation of Tradescantia zebrina is very easy: it will usually work to break off the end of a stem, make a hole in the dirt, and shove the stem in the hole. This works about 80-90% of the time whether you know what you're doing or not. Plants are also easily started as cuttings in water, which is the same process but with water instead of a hole in dirt: this works essentially 100% of the time. Usually roots will begin to grow within two weeks; often within one week. Pot them up whenever.

Tradescantia zebrina also grows quickly below-ground, so they tend to need frequent repotting, dividing or root-pruning, if you're wanting to keep the same plant going. In practice, it is often easier to just chop the whole thing back and use the pieces to start a brand-new plant. Moving a plant to a new pot that's two inches wider isn't necessarily a bad idea, but the bigger the plant gets, the less two inches is going to matter, and there comes a point where repotting is kind of pointless.⁷

The dead leaves have a tendency to crumble to dust when you try to take them off, which is sort of frustrating. On very large or old plants, one will also sometimes have to pull out dead stems,⁸ which is easier.

It's a safe plant to have around pets and children, though the sap can apparently be irritating to skin.⁹ So I don't advise eating it on purpose, regardless of age or species. The Wikipedia entry for Tradescantia zebrina contains a sentence saying that a tea is made from the plant in some parts of Mexico, which seems like a suspicious piece of information to me. Might be true, might not, probably best not to experiment on yourself (or other people!) in order to find out. There seem to be a lot of things like this in Wikipedia entries for plants: I'm starting to think that there must be someone who goes around and adds stuff like this to all the plant entries in the hopes of getting people to poison themselves (see also Zamioculcas zamiifolia and Pedilanthus tithymaloides).

Like all (all?) Tradescantias, this one does flower, though I don't think it forms seeds.¹⁰ The precise color of the flowers varies depending on the particular cultivar, but they are all small (about 0.5 in / 1 cm), three-petaled things in varying shades of purple, much like Tradescantia pallidas but slightly bluer and smaller. The flowers are pretty, but each individual flower only lasts a day. Good light and adequate feeding seem to be necessary but not sufficient for flowers: in the greenhouse at work, all the Tradescantias bloom at random moments throughout the year. (It doesn't seem to be seasonal, though admittedly I haven't been paying terribly close attention.) As I write this, the sillamontanas are flowering heavily, but not the zebrinas or pallidas, and I have yet to see the spathaceas at work ever flower. Earlier in the year, the pallidas were flowering but the sillamontanas and zebrinas were not.


At work, we have three different cultivars of T. zebrina at the moment; I don't have names for any of them.¹¹ The first is the one I think of as the "normal" wandering Jew. It has purple leaves, with clean-edged silver stripes on them. As best as I can figure out, this is the only one that was available back in the 1970s when wandering Jew was one of the big, popular houseplants, and it's still (arguably) the most attractive.

The second is also purple and silver, but the stripes aren't clean-edged: purple and silver fade into one another in spots, and there aren't many spots that are all purple or all silver. The leaves also seem to me to be a little broader than the standard version, and it's a little bit greener overall, whether in good light or not. The second picture in this post, waaaaay up there, is of this cultivar.

The third is almost entirely purple, and it's a redder purple than the other two. I wasn't initially that impressed by it, until we had to put some flats of it up high to get them out of the way, when I realized that they're downright gorgeous when they're backlit by the sun. In very bright light, some of the leaves will get partial silver stripes ("chevrons," one site called them), though only some.


There's also a green-and-white version, which I've seen occasionally. We don't have it at work, and I'm not positive that it's zebrina, actually, but it looks essentially the same except for color and most of the sources I ran across that mentioned it list it as a zebrina. I only know of one named cultivar, T. 'Quadricolor,' which is thought to be a hybrid of T. zebrina and T. fluminensis, and has pink, green and white stripes on the leaves' upper surface. We have something like this at work, though the leaves are significantly smaller and I'd assumed that it was probably a different species entirely. Also the variegation in the work ones has been disappearing; most of the stock now is just a plain, dull olive green on top and purple underneath. We can't seem to interest the customers in it whether it's variegated or not.

The regular variety, though, sells quite well, during two specific periods. We sell it in four-inch pots as a spring annual (I can't believe that so many people would pay so much money for something that would overwinter so well, but they do.), and it's been doing well this fall as an indoor houseplant in a hanging basket, partly (I suspect) because it's priced a little lower than most of the other plants of the same size. So we always have some of it around, though the form and amount vary a lot.

I don't know how much the name "wandering Jew" bothers people. It bothers me a little bit sometimes, though none of the alternate names (inch plant, spiderwort) are as specific or as well-known. I know at least one customer who bought it specifically for the name, though: I overheard one customer this spring talking to someone with her, to the effect of, "Oh. 'Wandering Jew.' Well, that's appropriate, right? Should we get it for them? You think they'd appreciate it?"


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Photo credits: Mine, except for the picture of the flower, which comes from Wikipedia and is credited to "ruestz."

¹ Which unless I'm very confused means "lover of maps" in Greek: carta meaning map, as in cartography, and philus being lover of, as in Philodendron, necrophilia, or philanthropy. (Carta could also mean paper/charter/document, apparently, as with the Magna Carta, so perhaps he just loved paper. Which is understandable.) Which I suppose if you were doomed to wander the earth for 1,975 years and counting, you would probably eventually get very good at reading maps, but you'd probably get pretty good at a lot of other things too.
² Nothing even a little bit like this is in the actual Bible, so there's no authoritative or definitive version of the story.
³ I suspect that this snarky aspect of the story comes from people who heard about Jesus being a badass in the temple with the moneychangers (Mark 11:15-17, Luke 19:45-46) and fearlessly taking on a Ficus carica tree (Mat. 21:18-22 / Mk. 11:12-14 and 20-24), and assumed that he was then obviously a macho stud who kicked ass and took names everywhere he went, especially the asses/names of those filthy, filthy Jews who killed him. A lot of Christians, I'm afraid, have absolutely no idea what Jesus was talking about and have never made even a tiny effort to read up on this or apply his teachings to their own personal lives. Either that, or they aren't even particularly interested, and only claim to be Christians because it's politically expedient to do so. I'm thinking of a few people in particular.
Either way, random Jew-cursing on the way to Golgotha is really not in character.
The withering-the-fig-tree business, either why Jesus did it or why anybody found it impressive, has always confused me. I mean, shit, I've withered some Ficus trees in my time; it's neither difficult nor impressive. And isn't it kind of, well, silly to curse a tree? Are we to understand that the tree could have had figs and for some reason chose not to? 'Cause if plants have free will, then we may as well throw this whole blog out and start over again.
⁴ Yes, there's a Wandering Jew FAQ. There is a webpage for everything. E.g. 5 Cats That Look Like Wilford Brimley. Or Japanese Women Slapping Each Other in the Face: the Game. Or Dramatic Readings of Break-Up Notes (don't listen if you're at work. It's not so much that it's NSFW, it'd just be embarrassing and weird to have people catch you listening to it.). I very much love the internet sometimes.
⁵ Names get confusing. With T. pallida, there seems to be fairly good agreement now that Tradescantia, and not Setcreasea, is the correct genus, but one still sees Tradescantia zebrina and Zebrina pendula used more or less interchangeably, and I honestly had to make a guess on the name for this post. Since the trend lately has been to lump plants together into a limited number of large genera, rather than splitting plants apart into many small genera, I'm going with Tradescantia zebrina. I'd love to know what the actual situation is: if anybody knows what the taxonomic consensus is these days, please, leave a comment.
⁶ This is especially bad from a retail perspective, because it means that plants aren't likely to ship very well. You can load the most beautiful plant in the world onto the truck, but if it arrives shattered into a million pieces, you've just wasted a lot of time. It's actually probably more economical (and less frustrating!) to mail the pieces and have the recipient plant them and grow them out. I try to remember to tell customers that although some of the plant will break off while they're getting it home, the pieces can be stuck back in the soil and will actually make the plant look better in the long run.
⁷ There are a lot of other relatively common houseplants like this, where it's often simpler to restart the plant than try to up-pot and shape it to look attractive. I'd include Plectranthus verticillatus in this category, as well as Hypoestes phyllostachya, Tradescantia pallida and Pilea cadierei.
⁸ Most dead stems result from accidental breakage of a plant as it's being moved; one doesn't notice that there's been a break immediately because the plant can keep going, recycling the water from old growth to build new growth, for a long time. Sometimes, too, in very old or dense plants, stems can weigh enough to starve one another of light, or crush one another under the accumulated weight of all the vines at once. It's not really a big deal either way, and the occasional dead stem doesn't mean the plant is dying.
⁹ Not a problem I've had personally, but people always mention this when talking about it so I figure I'd better as well.
¹⁰ I had a disagreement with one of the nursery lot guys about whether plants that flower necessarily always produce seeds, or are even necessarily capable of producing seeds. I said they don't and aren't. I can't prove this, but I'm 99%+ sure that I'm right about plants in general, that somewhere out there, there are entire species of plants that go through all the motions of flowering but are nevertheless completely sterile anyway. And I'm about 98% certain that some of those plants are Tradescantias, specifically pallida, zebrina, and spathacea. Maybe fluminensis and sillamontana too, even. He used to teach at a community college, though, so it's hard work to convince him of things he doesn't already believe.
¹¹ It's very likely that nobody sees the point in patenting a plant that propagates this easily: sure, you could get a patent, but enforcing the patent would be essentially impossible.