Wondering what you’ll be doing tonight, in Del Mar?

Succulents to be discussed

DEL MAR —- Debra Lee Baldwin, photojournalist and author of “Designing with Succulents” and “Succulent Container Gardens,” will speak at the San Diego Horticultural Society meeting at 6 p.m. July 12 at the Del Mar Fairgrounds, Surfside Race Place, 2260 Jimmy Durante Blvd. Baldwin will explain how to create container displays of geometric, architectural and water-wise succulent plants. Admission is $10 for prospective members, free for members. Parking is free. Call 760-295-7089 or visit sdhortsoc.org .

The Golden Gate Gardener (Pam Pierce) in the Sunday Chronicle has an article up about why you should be planting drought tolerant plantings in the Bay Area, even after a wet winter. They say we’re still only a dry winter or two away from water rationing.

Ingredients of a design for wet or dry years: Scarlet blooms of Aloe saponaria line both sides of a permeable pebble path.
Photo: David Goldberg

Wondering what to do today in New Mexico? Are you near Las Cruces? Then check out the succulent class today.

Explore Succulent Plants class will be held at 2 p.m. Saturday at Enchanted Gardens, 270 Avenida de Mesilla. Learn about the wide range of succulent plants that thrive on our patios and spread in our landscapes. Succulents have interesting shapes and colors and thrive in heat with low water. Cost is free for members and $7.50 for nonmembers. Reservations requested. Reservations or info: (575) 524-1886.

A cactus in Indiana has made good – they made the front page of the local newspaper! How quaint!

TERRE HAUTE — Bill and Mariea LaSure of Terre Haute are the proud owners of an especially interesting night-blooming cactus plant from Arizona. Starting with three small “starts” 12 years ago, this cactus – which the LaSures call “Angel of the Night” – has grown into three separate and hefty cactus plants.

“When they open up, they look like a big trumpet,” said Mariea, referring to the beautiful white and pink blooms that appear on the plants in the middle of the night. The blooms start to open around 10 p.m. and close up again around sunrise. “We’re just really proud of them.”

No pictures? I’m deeply apologetic to you. It was a good story, but would have been better with documentary proof.

Syracuse, New York, that is.

Hypertufa pots planted with succulents at Watson Greenhouse.
Gloria Wright / The Post-Standard

Sempervivums, crassula, senecio, echeveria, kalanchoe and maybe a sedum to be exact. Good hardy succulents for an upstate NY collection. Well, not so hardy really, except the sempervivums. Maybe best to keep them indoor this winter.

The Washington Post is all over it, having nothing better to cover, I’m sure.

Michelle Obama has Obama-ized the White House with healthful menus, planted bok choy and rhubarb to supply them and ramped up the fashion quotient with metallic strapless dresses and studded belts. Her latest style statement: official flowers in a looser “garden” style by Laura Dowling, the new White House chief floral designer….

“(S)ometimes instead of flowers, we can use vegetables for a centerpiece.”

The humble cactus is even crashing the party. At the May state dinner for Mexican President Felipe Calderón, prickly pear cactus showed up in vermeil wine coolers, and Dowling also tucked a few among the centerpieces.

Now you know. And all of official Washington now knows too, what with the press that the “humble cactus” is getting from the largest newspapers around.

Ugly cactus plants produce an elegantly breathtaking flower.

I take exception to that; not the breathtaking flower part, but the ugly cactus part. Hah!

The night-blooming cereus will bloom several times a summer. Journal photo by Bruce Chapman

Some of the ugliest plants that I cultivate have the most beautiful flowers.

These are cactus in a group known as Selenicereus. They are long and ropy looking; their tangled, vine-like growth is lined with small spines that aid in clinging and climbing their way into tree canopies and over cliff faces.

In addition, there are often stringy aerial roots that add to the general appearance of being frayed rope with spines. They are not the sort of thing you’d bring home to your mother.

Well, sure, you wouldn’t take it home to your mother, but that doesn’t mean I would take it home to my mother, which I wouldn’t, but that’s because she’d kill it.

From the Redding (CA) Record-Searchlight we find out about a lovely backyard garden with succulents, in Redding!

Photo by Andreas Fuhrmann
Succulents are among the many types of plants in the yard. The landscape also is accented with statuary.

Ten years ago Lynn Clay decided to tweak her Redding backyard….

“It started out to be just adding a little of this and a little of that,” she recalled.

Then her gardening instincts kicked in.

“One thing led to another. By the second year I was going forward with a vision of lushness and interest,” she said.

Nice pictures with the article, especially the mosaics. I guess you have to click through to the article to see those photos, as I haven’t been gracious enough to repost them here.

People often ask me, what should they plant? In Denver, the Denver Post found the answer to be cactus and succulents. And a big agave is always a good idea for the centerpiece.

Steve Miles says “I tried vegetables. I tried fruit trees, but nothing worked.” He finally found success with succulents. A secret pocket garden of cactus now thrives on the sunny side of his Boulder home. (Cyrus McCrimmon, The Denver Post)

That is a very nice garden. No, wait, that’s not a strong enough word. To the thesaurus! Shall we try stunning? Oooh, I like stupefying.

In Idaho, the Idaho Statesman found the lovely backyard Alligator Cactus garden that we’ve all been looking for.

Joe Jaszewski / Idaho Statesman
The garden of Roger Hankins and Dick Mallea. Within the sparkling combination of shade and water sits Mallea’s alligator cactus desert. Three stepping stones, set in sand, form the body of the alligator (just visible beyond the heron in the photo at top). The cactus came from the ranch where Mallea grew up in Shoshone.

Hap has some cousins who live in Shoshone. It’s a desert out there.

A little long, but quite entertaining as Whysall visits WIG in Burnaby. I don’t know what that means, but I like the sound of it. I especially like the way they hold the plants while talking.

Yay!

“Waiting for Romance” by Ryan Mosley

Painting Séance
Through July 24 at Grand Arts, 1819 Grand, Kansas City, MO 816-421-6887, grandarts.com

“Something might happen in one painting that affects the others.” The three largest canvases — “Wild Brew,” “Waiting for Romance” and “Target Practice” (an impossible still life depicting a large cactus growing from a stack of hats) — present the same Southwestern color palette and shared visual motifs: mustachioed frontiersmen, jumbles of cowboy boots, old-fashioned hats, a cream-colored background expanse. “I think it feels like something is about to happen,” Mosley says of the three paintings….

The cacti make up the exhibit’s most obvious theme. They grow from the ground, surrounding the figures, their arms gesturing from the edges of the compositions like the marginalia of illuminated manuscripts. “I’ve always been interested in figurative painting, and cacti are the most figurative plants,” he says. “It’s like they’re waving at you.”

“Taking Care of the Crops” by Ryan Mosley at Grand Arts

This is some impressive painting work. I won’t be able to make it to Kansas City, or to his gallery in London either. I will just have to be satisfied with this online selection.

The brand new Kickapoo Cavern State Park near Del Rio, Texas just opened and you can visit the caverns if you want, but I’ll be checking out the cactus.

At least 15 caves are located in the park, including Kickapoo Cavern, home to the state’s largest “speleotherm,” an eight-story tall column of limestone and the Stuart Bat Cave, roost of an estimated million Mexican Free-tailed Bats.

Oh, well, maybe I’ll check out the caves too.

The park is… home to an endangered cactus, the Tobusch fishhook cactus.

© Photo courtesy Paul M. Montgomery

Apparently it looks like Mars in Emery County, Utah, so the good folks at Disney/Pixar are filming Mars-scapes there. They key to the look? Cactus.

“The Factory Butte, and Swing Arm City sites are all located on Mancos Shale and it is this shale that makes the area suitable for the “Mars” environment.”

I mean it’s the shale that makes it look like Mars. And the cactus, too.

The primary site that John Carter Of Mars is filming on near Factory Butte is actually in the footprint of a small coal strip mine.

OK, so strip mining is a good way to turn Earth into Mars.

The Muddy Creek area, to be filmed by air,… was dotted with access roads for Uranium Development

And Uranium mining too. But what about the cactus?

In particular, three species of rare Cactus are present in surrounding areas. Pediocactus despainii, San Rafael cactus and Pediocactus winkleri, commonly known as Winkler’s cactus and Sclerocactus wrightiae, commonly known as Wrights Fishhook Cactus are very small cactus varieties that are difficult to see and therefore can be easily destroyed. These species are only indiginous to the Central and Eastern parts of Utah and are listed as Threatened or Endangered.

So did they step on the cactus? No word yet.

Apparently we missed a cactus concert this past weekend in Chicago. Did you miss it too? Well, you can get the album instead. I feel better already.

New York’s So Percussion has… been working with eccentric Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos—they played a concert together at the Chicago Cultural Center in October 2006—and that collaboration has finally resulted in an album, Treasure State (Cantaloupe).

(T)hey make instruments of beer cans, cactus, and bits of ceramic, among other things—though their tones are so heavily processed it’s hard to tell.

Kim Fundingsland/MDN
Johannes Olwage, Minot, holds a cactus plant from the Don Vitko collection. Olwage has been cataloging the plants in preparation for moving them to the International Peace Garden.

The harissia cactus was introduced as a pot plant over 100 years ago and has since spread throughout a lot of Queensland.

The Banana Shire Council’s rural services coordinator Gordon Twiner says they are working with landholders to try to get on top of the cactus which is spread by birds.

Foreign languages, even when in English, are odd and confusing. Did you know the cactus was a “pot plant” in the “Banana Shire” and that “landholders” want to be “on top of the cactus”? Interesting. Let me translate that for you using google translate, into german and back to english. We get this:

The harissia cactus was introduced as a potted plant over 100 years ago and has since spread a lot of Queensland.

The Banana Shire’s rural services coordinator Gordon climbing plant, it says landowners are working to try on top of the cactus, which is spread by birds receive.

That didn’t work out too well. It did translate “pot plant” into “potted plant” and “landholder” into “landowner” so that was good. Now if only we knew what this “Banana Shire” was and why the people there want to sit on the cactus?

The Harrisia cactus is a night-blooming cereus known as the Moon Cactus (Harrisia martinii). Hard to know why it would be considered a dangerous weed from that photo.

The blooms are stunning! This can’t be a problem cactus to anyone.

Here we see why it’s a problem when it has escaped into the Australian wilds. Indeed that does look like a problem. If someone wants to send me some cuttings, I’ll be happy to research the plant.

I see we’re finally getting some heat around here – mid 80s today and tomorrow. Finally, the cactus flowers that have been half opened all through this cold and windy spring will finally get their chance to shine – the opportunity to open fully! if they haven’t given up already. (That happens too.)

I’ll keep an eye out for them and take any and all pictures that I can.

In the meantime, I thought I should bring up the topic of planting summer tomatoes. I know you’ve already planted your spring tomatoes, but have you thought what will happen when they are done and you have no more tomatoes on the vine? Maybe you should think about your second crop of tomatoes, get ready to plant them this weekend so you’ll have delicious local tomatoes all summer and fall. Why am I bringing this up? Because we’re having a special on organic heirloom tomatoes this weekend, of course. Buy 5 organic veggie starts and get the 6th free. Yay! Read More…

You’re in Dallas, it’s hot and you can’t take a beach holiday since the Gulf Coast is closed. I know! Take a class!

AGAVES, YUCCAS AND OTHER SUCCULENTS: Learn the basics of succulents, including how to select, plant and care for these architectural plants for the Texas heat. 11 a.m. Saturday. North Haven Gardens, 7700 Northaven Road, Dallas. Free.

We just got back from delivering some of our succulent wall panels to a new TV show on the DIY Network. They filmed the delivery for the show. Here I am photographing people waiting around on the set, which is someone’s home being renovated.

Ian’s been making mini terrariums. Lot’s of tillandsias. Here’s one that’s planted with cactus.

They’re very popular.

Agave Nectar is the latest hot product in the sweetener world. I like it for making drinks, and I even use it in spaghetti sauce occasionally.

Just as maple syrup is a wholly natural sweetener from Mother Nature’s maple tree, agave (pronounced ah-gah-vay) is a natural nectar from the cactus plant.

But that’s not right – Agaves aren’t a cactus plant. You can get all kinds of fruits and vegetables from cactus plants, but not agave nectar (and not tequila either.) Click through the links for recipes.

The Central Valley (CA) has had water issues. Some orchards have died for lack of water, or at least for lack of drip watering systems. Cactus may be the answer.

A cactus plant that produces delicious fruit may show promise for cultivation in the water-short west side of the San Joaquin Valley.

Its second promising feature is its absorption of selenium, a compound that is overabundant in westside soils….

A cooperative project between the U.S. Department of Agriculture at its facility in Parlier in Fresno County and Fresno State University is evaluating the growth potential of the cactus…

The cactus under study is Opuntia, a variety native to the U.S. Southwest. It grows in the wild in desert and arid regions, the Western Pacific and near the Mediterranean. Its fruit is called cactus fig, although some have referred to the bright red delicacies as cactus apples and prickly pears….

Three irrigation strategies are being studied. One involves good quality water; another, poor quality water; and the third, no water at all. Absorption of selenium by the cactus will be measured and evaluated.

Another important aspect of the study is the exploration of new and improved food products developed from the figs and the thick cactus stems. The fruit of the cactus is edible when peeled, and sweeter and juicier than might be expected. Its pulp and juice have been used to produce jams, jellies, candies and other fruit products.

“Bright red delicacies” indeed!

One of Monterey County’s historic horticultural treasures will be on display during this holiday weekend, as work begins to rediscover its unique, original qualities. The Arizona Garden was designed and installed in the early 1880s as a feature of the luxurious new Hotel del Monte, which was built to attract passengers for the just-completed transcontinental railroad.

This colorized postcard showing the Arizona Garden was sent out by Hotel Del Monte sometime around 1890. (SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND ARCHIVES, DUDLEY KNOX LIBRARY, NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL)

Someone is growing a variety of plants in Oklahoma, according to the Tulsa World.

And you can get in on it too, with the big annual sale coming up next week.

Cactus and Succulent Society of Tulsa
When: 1-5 p.m. May 22, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. May 23
Where: Tulsa Garden Center, 2435 S. Peoria Ave.
Info: 357-2401

I hope someone remembers to bring a lot of those indoors come winter.

It turns out there are lots of cactus stories that do not come from Arizona, if you look for them. Here we have an event this morning in Las Vegas at Springs Preserve, a lovely place to visit.

Learn about the cactus at Springs Preserve
May 15: “Cactus Fun And Games” Join the Nature Exchange staff for learning and crafts all about the toughest plants in the desert. For all ages. 10:30 a.m. to noon. $8 adults, $6 children. $2 less for members.

I hope it’s not too late for you to get over there, and even if you miss the fun and games there’s the big June Blues Festival at Springs Preserve.

A little bit of the press release blogging for a Friday afternoon. They make my job so much easier! Don’t miss the upcoming Central Oregon high desert class on hardy, blooming cactus by “The Cactus Guy.”

Prickly Plants: Add Color to Your Yard with Blooming Cactus
This event is free to the public.

WHO: Bill Willis, the owner of Great Basin Cactus located in Terrebonne, will cover what cactus are the best choices for Central Oregon. He has traveled extensively throughout the western United States, studying and collecting cactus.

WHEN: Saturday, May 29, 2010; 10:00 a.m.

WHERE: The CHS Garden Center, located at 60 N.W. Depot Rd. just off Hwy. 26, north of Madras, Oregon at the top of the hill.

We recently did a mixed succulent container garden demo for our local Design Within Reach. We filled up one of their fantastic Vaso Rettangolare Illuminated Planters. It will be on display at the Berkeley store for the rest of the month, and maybe longer!

A couple more shots after the break… Read More…