Haworthia Ice City

Name and Characters: Ice冰 City城 Longevity寿 

Ice City

Haworthia Ice City has very distinctive, triangular-shaped leaves with exceptionally large windows, and it can grow quite large when fully mature. Using my kind of forgotten 😓math knowledge, I’d describe these windows as resembling irregular triangular pyramids.

I believe the combination of large opaque windows, pyramid-like 3D structure, sharp edges and defined lines is what gave the plant its name, Ice City. Its leaves are considered a mutant form because this irregular, three-dimensional window shape does not occur naturally—it arose from a mutation during tissue culture.

Things get even more confusing from here. Ice City itself is already a mutant of haworthia pygmaea, but there is another mutant form of it sold (which is probably a hybrid). In the market, when you see Haworthia Ice City, it usually refers to the original, more common mutant. When you see Haworthia Ice City Mutant, it typically means the secondary mutant form, which has even larger, frostier windows, and shorter leaves. However, due to translation or naming inaccuracy, the original common mutant is sometimes also labeled as Ice City Mutant. Because of this, accurate identification is important to avoid buying the wrong plant.

Ice City Mutant

In case you are curious, the term Longevity (寿) is somewhat arbitrary and generally just refers to haworthias with triangular leaves rather than round leaves like cooperi or rectangular or square leaves like truncata and maughanii. I recommend thinking of it simply as meaning “haworthia” and largely ignoring it in translation because it doesn't help with identification. I’ll go into more detail about this in a dedicated post later.

Variegated 锦

I mentioned in another post that the variegated Ice City shows mostly yellow variegation and doesn’t really stress pink, orange, or red. It looks very similar to the non-variegated Ice City. It’s still quite small, so I’m excited to see how it looks as it grows bigger.