Amid the burgeoning hulk of snarled branches lies the secret to this popular houseplant’s namesake—the pervasive medieval legend of Ahasuerus, the Wandering Jew. As an ornamental hanging plant, a decorative ground cover sown beneath park benches, a wild trailing decumbent found along forest floors on at least four continents, and as the protagonist in a recurring folktale of a man doomed to an eternal life of peregrination, the wandering Jew bewilders novice green thumbs and anthropomorphizes the Jewish Diaspora.

—Brian H. Kehrl