Cactus Blog 

“Succulents… can make great presents.”

From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Now you know even Wisconsinites like succulents

“Succulents are hot-hot-hot”

Good to know! That was Kate Bryant for the Portland Monthly writing about yuccas.

Sometimes we can identify Aeoniums, other times we prefer to just make up names. What do you think?

Hi

It was really nice meeting you this week. You have a fantastic place and some really fine specimans of cactus, especially Aeoniums. The pictures attached may be Aeoniums but I have not been able to identify them. Can you tell me if they are Aeoniums? If not, any ideas? By the way, within this planter are two different types of the same plant. The really purple ones, and the less purple with more green.

I really appreciate it. I have one other species of Aeonium I’m going to send pictures of. I cannot identify it either.

Have a great weekend. I’m sure we’ll see you again.

Fran

Fran,
The unknown one will have to remain unknown for now. I’ll blog it to see if anyone else can come up with a cultivar name. Otherwise, I recommend Aeonium “Wizard”.

The other lower ones, green with pink edging, are Aeonium subplanum.

Lupinus albifrons is a California native, including throughout Northern California and into Oregon, that mounds about 3 ft with another 2ft. worth of bloom spikes on top of that. It’s cold hardy to 20F and can handle some heat too, although the plant will be a lot smaller in the interior of the state.

Butterflies are attracted to this plant, as one would expect.

Lupines are early adopters of fire-ravaged landscapes and naturally deer-resistant. Only one of those 2 pieces of information is useful to gardeners.

It is a critical host plant for the Mission Blue Butterfly, whose larvae will only eat this or 2 other lupines. So let your garden plants be eaten to help preserve the Mission Blue? Or maybe do some random plantings of L. albifrons out on the hillsides when no one is looking. Now is a good time to get them to root and establish.

1. Our first tumblr! Mark is a customer who documents his succulents in lots of photos on I Can Stop Tomorrow, which means, I think, that he really can’t stop tomorrow. You can start here with a non-succulent post, because his Protea was starting to bloom in October! So early for a “Late Mink”.

2. Candy “Sweetstuff” recently lost a large Opuntia that bloomed like crazy. Check out her trip to the Huntington greenhouses.

3. Plantgasm was already on the list, but I thought I would bring your attention to this post of pirates and succulents. Why? Because there aren’t enough posts about pirates and succulents in the world. Google it yourself and see what I mean!

Species are once again starting to get protected.

The Obama administration issued a new “candidate notice of review” today identifying 244 plants and animals that need the protections of the Endangered Species Act to avoid extinction….

Florida semaphore cactus: The Florida semaphore cactus has been waiting for protection for six years. It is a large prickly pear cactus from the Florida Keys that was thought to have been driven extinct by cactus collectors and road construction in the late 1970s but was rediscovered in the mid-1980s. Much of its historic habitat has fallen prey to development, destruction and fragmentation. Just two populations remain….

and also…

Sonoyta mud turtle: The Sonoyta mud turtle has been a candidate since 1997. In the United States, it has been reduced to a single reservoir in Arizona that is isolated from populations in Mexico. The turtle eats insects, crustaceans, snails, fish, frogs and plants. Females bury their eggs on land.

Poor turtles left to live in the mud of just one reservoir.

Cactus Thieves Caught in the Act!

Prosecutors in Mexico have charged two German citizens with wildlife trafficking after they were detained at Mexico City international airport with 543 cacti.

The attorney general’s office… said some of the species found in their four suitcases were considered endangered.

Never pull plants out of the wild, or try to take them out of a country without a proper permit. That would be the lesson, if there were a lesson to be learned, by The Case of the Cactus Smugglers.

The Ocotillos are leafing out so pretty!

Fouquieria diguetii

Fouquieria formosa

Fouquieria splendens has very fresh new little leaflets!

Tucked away in a quiet street in Għaxaq is a treasure which Renè Zahra has nurtured for the past 60 years… into one of Malta’s richest collections…. (of) succulents and cacti… Photo: Jason Borg

It’s nice to keep busy with the same thing for over 60 years.

Erigeron glaucus

This reliable year-round bloomer is in full bloom. We have a different color group of plants than we had this spring. It’s the same species, so maybe we should check for cultivar names, but I don’t like flower-color-cultivars so I will probably accept that this lovely California coastal daisy has variable flower colors naturally.

The Blog has been down for the last 2 days, you may have noticed. I was setting up to sell our succulent wreaths online (you can check it out here) and then everything was lost; gone! By yesterday morning the main site had enough information that I could get it back, and by this morning the rest of the site had been migrated back to it’s right place, but still the wordpress settings weren’t aligning properly. But now we got that last little detail fixed and I can get back to blogging all my quirky comments and pretty pictures for you.

Here, have one now.

They’re Chive Pods repurposed as airplant terrariums. Tillandsias rule the winter.

Benjamin and Amica 6 years ago.

Google took pictures inside the nursery months ago and now they’ve finally got a walk though of the nursery up.

View Larger Map

Interesting. Now all you people not in the Bay Area can see who we are. Freaky.

The rainy season has started so now is the time for all good California gardeners to start planting native plants. Yarrows are good. This one is Achillea “Fireland”, a nice color.

If you plant them now they won’t go dormant as soon as you plant them like if you had planted them in July.

If you plant them now you won’t have to water since the rains will take care of that for you.

If you plant them now they’ll grow lots of roots over the winter so in the spring when you want big pretty plants you’ll have big pretty plants popping up all over.

What am I talking about? I’m talking about getting with the program. I’m talking about planting California native plants in the fall.

Here, have another plant. It’s the picture of the Solanum “Indian’s Grey” I promised you last month when all I had was a crappy cell phone picture. This one was taken with a proper camera.

The common name is Blue Witch.

From Mosstika comes some succulent graffiti made out of sedum and in the form of a living portrait.

It all becomes clear if you click through and see more.

This picture came to me in an email trying to get me to watch a video about how garden centers can better connect with their customers.

If connecting with my customers requires me to wear what looks like a puppet frog on my shoulder, then… well….

But no, my videos will never feature me with a puppet frog on my shoulder. Kids can go play with the whippets if they come to the nursery.

This random cactus video with the french music has 2 blooming christmas cacti in it and a view of the snow on the ground out the window. So you know it’s seasonably appropriate and enjoyable to watch.

Delosperma lavisiae

We’ve been gathering some of our low-growing plants together in one location, adding the 1gallon size to the mix, and calling it our Groundcover Section.

For some reason I scanned this a few years ago. Maybe I blogged it back then?

While working on a new T-Shirt design I came upon some old photos.

My botanical photo style has changed a lot over the years. Here’s one from 10 years ago. I was more experimental back then. I took the picture with film, printed out a contact strip and then scanned the picture as hi-res as I could. It has a certain feel to it.

Fouquieria splendens – Ocotillo

(Y)ou can learn about all kinds of succulents at a free show opening at the McLean Library on the 1st floor of the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society at 20th and Arch. See exotic varieties of succulents and cacti and learn how easy it is to grow them indoors and out – including succulents you can grow on a green roof, giving a deeper meaning to the term ‘houseplant.’

The Pennsylvania Horticultural Society hosts the annual Philadelphia Flower Show in March so you know it’s a big organization.

They have last year’s videos still up, and here’s a kid who shows cactus and succulents at the show, as well as other “challenge” plants.

The prettiest of all the Echeverias is undoubtedly Echeveria alpina.

You cannot deny this – you know it to be true. Others may be interesting, or have bigger blooms or be more unusual or more coveted, but none are prettier.

Echeveria “Bluebird” comes close.

Apparently there were a lot of white-flowering lithops in Iowa recently. Plants are the Strangest People has the photographic evidence.

Pretty.

It’s a very good addition to the Succulent literature. Different than other books – it’s not an encyclopedia or generalist list, and it’s not a how-to book either. It’s got an amazing number of species listed with lots of photos, many from habitat, so not all are available to buy anywhere and not all will look like the pictures when you do find one. But the depth is unusual, like there are 11 pictures of Anacampseroses, and another 4 pictures of the related Avonias. How about that!

The Timber Press Guide to Succulent Plants of the World by Fred Dortort

I’ll do a more in depth review later, but we do have a case of them at the nursery if you need it right away, which I’m sure many of you do.

Melony Meadows selects some succulents she won in a raffle during a water conservation fair Saturday at Vintage Hills Park in Temecula. ANDREW FOULK | For The Californian

It looks like a fun day was had by all. Except whoever came in 2nd place and didn’t get to take home the succulents. They were pissed.

I love local stories!

Did I mention that our Succulent Wreaths are ready?

If you pre-ordered one it’s ready for pick up. If you didn’t, we have lots of succulent wreaths ready and fully rooted in 2 sizes at the store.

Monterey is a nice place. They no longer have the stink of the famous fish canneries, so it’s a good place to visit on a warm weekend afternoon.

And now they have a community green roof project too. Good for them.

Carmel Middle School’s new green building received a green addition last week: a living roof.

After five weeks of planning, workers planted more than 600 bushes, succulents, flowers and grasses of 42 species on the soil-covered roof of the green building next to Carmel Middle School on Wednesday morning. The roof was specially constructed to support 6 inches of soil, vegetation and a special system to recycle rainwater to irrigate the plants….

It joins an organic garden, an outdoor kitchen, demonstration gardens and greenhouses, an amphitheater for ornithology, and owl boxes….

Most of the plants on the new roof are habitat plants, chosen to feed and house insects and birds. (VERN FISHER/The Herald)

Christie stopped by to show us her costume, a rare orange-flowered spineless prickly pear.

Nice!