The places where Portulacaria afra, in Afrikaans the spekboom (blubber tree) grows, include rocky hillsides in montane scrub where it may perch on cliffs as here.

Spekboomveld, a noted habitation type of the Little Karoo and the Eastern Cape is dominated by this shrub where thickets occur comprising mainly these plants.

The distribution of the species ranges from the Little Karoo along a broad strip in the east of the country through KwaZulu-Natal to Mpumalanga and Limpopo. It also grows in Swaziland and southern Mozambique (Coates Palgrave, 2002; Vlok and Schutte-Vlok, 2010; Smith and Crouch, 2009).