Chinese Money Plant

Season note

Water when the top inch of soil feels dry; the semi-succulent leaves store some water, so it tolerates brief dry spells.

Overwatering signs

Yellowing leaves, soggy soil

Underwatering signs

Drooping leaves

Light level

bright indirect

Best rooms

Soil

Well-draining potting mix

Humidity

Tolerates average household humidity

Fertilizer

Diluted fertilizer monthly in spring and summer, and when producing offsets

Temperature range

15°C – 24°C

Chinese money plant, botanically Pilea peperomioides, is native to the Yunnan and Sichuan provinces of southern China, growing wild on damp, shaded rocks in the Cang Mountain range at elevations roughly between 1,500 and 3,000 metres. It belongs to the nettle family, Urticaceae — the same family that includes stinging nettle, though Pilea peperomioides notably lacks the irritating stinging hairs found on many of its relatives. The plant's journey from an obscure, unremarkable wild species to one of the most recognizable and sought-after houseplants of the 21st century is a genuinely unusual story spanning more than a century and involving two entirely separate Western "discoveries."

The Scottish botanist George Forrest first collected specimens of the plant in Yunnan in 1906 and again in 1910, but his samples went largely unstudied and effectively forgotten, uncatalogued until well after his death. The plant's real path into Western cultivation instead traces to 1945 or 1946, when Agnar Espegren, a Norwegian missionary, picked up a cutting of the plant during a stop in Kunming, in the heart of Yunnan Province, while evacuating his family from China amid the country's civil war. Espegren carried the cutting with him on a lengthy journey that took his family through Calcutta, India, before finally returning to Norway in 1946 — remarkably, the plant survived the entire trip. Once home, Espegren discovered his cutting was still alive, and once given proper care, it rewarded him with dozens of offsets, which he shared freely with friends and family. Those recipients, in turn, propagated and shared their own plants further, and the species spread gradually and almost entirely informally through Scandinavia and eventually much of the rest of the world over subsequent decades, passed hand to hand as an unnamed, unofficial "friendship plant" long before it had any formal recognition or commercial presence in the nursery trade. It wasn't until 1978, when a Mrs. D. Walport of Northolt, England sent a sample to the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew for identification, that Western botanists finally connected this widely circulating but essentially unstudied houseplant to Forrest's original, decades-forgotten 1912 species description.