NEW THIS MONTH
JULY
I hope you had a nice holiday weekend, we did! A day off on a Sunday? What an unusual thing! But we are back now and better than, well just as good as yesterday. We have made some big changes behind the scenes in where and how we grow our plants for you – we are moving a lot of our parent cactus and succulents to San Anselmo where we will be better able to take timely cuttings and grow new plants for all your plant needs. We do this for you! We have added a new Houseplant growing house too, so that will be nice and warm, and a little bit more moist than most of our grow spaces. By next month we should have our first crop of in-house grown Alocasias. Calatheas are doing well, more Carnivorous plants coming…
We no longer require masks in our stores for those who are fully vaccinated. Enjoy your vaccinated life!
LOCAL DELIVERIES
Our online store is here. Delivering throughout the areas near to our 2 stores, and SF.
Deliveries are usually in 1-3 days but may take up to 1 week, Monday thru Friday. We will call to let you know when we will be by before we come.
List of the communities in the Bay Area we deliver to is here.
Pickup in store
Our new online shop also has a way when you are checking out to click Pickup in Store, and then you can pick it up in store, especially useful for everyone who are outside our local delivery zones but still want to shop online and come in to our store.
Cactus Jungle, Berkeley
1509 4th Street
Berkeley, CA 94710
(510) 558-8650
Current Hours: Open Wed-Sun 9:30-5
Cactus Jungle, Marin and
Ross Valley Nursery
130 Sir Francis Drake Blvd
San Anselmo, CA 94960
(415) 870-9930
Current Hours: Open Wed-Sun 9:30-5
SUCCULENT
Aeonium atropurpureum is one of the classic original rosette succulents that are spectacular in Mediterranean climates like ours since they come from the Mediterranean climate of Mediterranean Europe. Of course, that will mean they are winter growers, and shrink up to much smaller rosettes in summer. You can water them, but they will still want to almost go dormant.
Aeonium “Salad Bowl” is a very green leafy plant, also winter growing, also Mediterranean climate etc… but green, very green.
It’s our latest crop of the very popular Agave “Snow Glow”. So popular that we cannot keep up with demand. We always try to grow everything everyone wants in enough quantity to make everyone happy, but that’s not really true – we try to grow only enough to make us a profit. We’re a business! But we do have other agaves and mangaves you can see there too, so if we run out of one, we’ll always have another.
Echeveria “Blue Prince” is a blue variety of the old standby Black Prince Echeveria. Except it’s not, this cultivar is not grown from the Black Prince at all, it’s not even closely related! False Advertising, I shout out. But it does have that dark glaucus rosette thing going for it.
Echeveria “Cubic Frost” are huge, oversized, ready to be planted. Big folded leaves, big color.
Echeveria “Royal Hercules” rounds out our Echeveria selection today, and it too is a glaucus rosette. Are you wondering yet what that means? It’s used in botanical language to mean blue. That’s it! Blue! It can also be part of a plant name, indicating, what was that? Blue! Mostly a pale greyish-blue, but also sometimes a pale greenish-blue too.
It turns out I have one more Echeveria for you today, Echeveria “White Rose” which seems like it should be a cante cultivar, but this is not. Someone swooped in and stole the name for something else. It seems wrong, but it is legal. Go figure! The Supreme Court has more important matters to worry about, like how to disenfranchise as many POC as possible while seeming to be protecting rights. Hah!
Graptoverias have been very popular this year, and we have had many, this one is named Graptoveria “Olivia”. Others have other names. If you are an Olivia or know one, then think about this, this may have been named after you. Spooky!
We’ve been growing and selling this Haworthia attenuata for many years, and you can tell from the name of the picture file, haworthia_attenuata11. I have photographed this for the monthly emails now 11 times! First one was back in 2009, most recent prior was 2019. That’s a lot of these cute little stripey succulents.
Jovibarba hirta “Hedgehog” is closely related to the Hens and Chicks (Sempervivum), not to the Hedgehog cactus (Echinocereus). But it has it’s own common name, Beard of Jupiter. Don’t ask me why, please don’t go there.
Lithops are small, and are now in stock. Very low water, South African, rock-colored, also known as Living Stones.
Mangave “Bloodspot” was featured last month too, but now we have more sizes! More crops! More bloody intergenic hybrids for everyone. This is a 2g crop, last month we featured a 7g crop, plus we also have 4″ and maybe a couple 1g’s left too. Every size!
Mangave “Pineapple Express” is just the finishing touch you needed for that corner of the garden that has been quiet for too long. Check it.
Moonstones! So nice. Pachyphytum oviferum.
Sansevieria “Fernwood Mikado” are weird. We got these in and they are clumps of individual spears of S. Fernwood, and they put them all together to looko like something else. But they are very productive, and you can see lots of new growth coming up. So you will be able to see what they really look like, not this weird amalgamation. Educational!
Senecio rowleyanus “Variegata” used to be very rare, this variegated string of pearls, but it’s now less rare.
CACTUS
Goldie Rita is the yellowest of the yellow flowered prickly pears. Opuntia santa-rita “Goldie Rita”. The pads will turn purple generally in winter from the cold. If they are green now that’s because it’s not cold out, notwithstanding Berkeley fog and cool summer mornings. It’s not cold enough.
Here’s a new one for us, Corryocactus erectus, the Red Hot Chili Pepper Cactus. Erect stems, sprawling forms, bright red chili-peppers on the ends. Fun times! Be the life of the party!
OK, I know you also wanted a flower picture, the so-called chili peppers, so you get 2 pictures of this one cactus today. Fuzzy stems, red flowers, the combo is unbeatable. OK, so not very chili-pepper like. The shape, the color, the texture, the flavor, not the same!
For some reason I have always separated out the “Rare” plants from the “Cactus” in these emails, but sometimes it is hard to know why, one or another small plant may be more or less rare, but this one is a cactus after all too. We have 2 of the blooming Hedgehog Cacti today, so this one goes here, the other down there. Echinocereus reichebachii is less rare anyway. Feathery spine groupings…
Opuntia robusta is always among our most popular of the bluish round-pads prickly-pear cactus. Lizards find them popular too for catching some rays while hanging out in the desert, or your garden.
RARE PLANTS
And here you go, your “Rare” Hedgehog cactus, Echinocereus laui. It really is more rare! Also has beautiful flowers, but in the meantime we can swoon over those colorful stems with the reddish spines on top.
And now we get to the not-just-rare but also the difficult-to-grow (rot-prone) and crazy-beautiful-weird-flowers. Edithcolea grandis, the Persian Carpet Flower. Check out my picture of the flower here.
Euphorbia meloformis is not as desired by the collectors as it’s cousin E. obesa, but it is also round and has chevron markings and stripes and can be collected for all these reasons, plus those bloom spikes! Like the antlers on a buck.
Now this one is a special Pachypodium-like Euphorbia, Euphorbia pachypodioides. (Is there a Euphorbia-like Pachypodium? Yes! Guess the name. No, just kidding. But there are a number of species with the name euphorbioides so there’s that to look forward to another month.)
Melocactus azureus will form a large cephalium on top, hence the common name Turk’s Cap. I don’t know what any of that means either, but it makes me sound sophisticated.
HOUSEPLANTS
Maranta “Green” is a very nice Prayer Plant houseplant, but they may have already sold out – the photo was taken last week, but this email is this week. I wonder?!? But I like the picture so I included it anyway. If you click, maybe there is stock, maybe not. Have I enticed you to click through yet? How about now?
Peperomia asperula is also a rare plant, but not today, not right now. I’m here in the houseplant section and this beautiful window-leafed succulent houseplant is sitting right here too and that’s enough for me. To the Houseplants!
Ferns. We grow ferns too! Pteris ensiformis is the Black Lace Fern. Since it’s a fern it’s a pretty good bet for your low-light locations. Oops, I meant Silver Lace Fern, where was my mind?
PERENNIALS AND SHRUBS
California native Yarrow come in White flowers, so this white flowered one is a native flowered one, what was I saying? Achillea millefolium “Lost Coast” is a cultivar originally found on the Lost Coast of Northern California. If you don’t know where that is, look it up, I won’t help you find it.
Anigozanthos “Cape Red Lead” is the brightest of the red Kangaroo Paws. We have other colors available too, if you ask.
Ceanothus “Diamond Heights” is a low growing California Lilac shrub with the craziest variegated leaves, very rare and unusual, we only have a few at our Berkeley store.
Spurges have been in short supply this year – did you notice that 2 years ago it was the Kangaroo Paws that were low? Well this year it’s the spurges. Here have a spurge: Euphorbia amygdaloides v. robbiae. Low growing with sulfury chartreusey flowers (cyathium)
Pincushion Flowers are all the rage, generally Australian, and very colorful, they are low water and low-care, low fertilizer, but they do like it when you pet them. Leucadendron “Red Gem”
Leucadendron “Wilson’s Wonder” is even more red than Red Gem. All are part of the Protea Family, Proteaceae. Did I get those last e’s and a’s in the right order? It can be confusing. …aceae, and don’t get me started on the …oideae’s. These are more botanical jokes, so you can ignore me if my years of botanical jokes in these emails haven’t gotten through to you yet. Enjoy!
Also in the Protea Family, we are fully stocked on Proteas and Banksias, and here we have Protea “Liebencherry” which is the very cherry red blooming selection. I don’t have a flower picture for you, but if you google it they’re out there.’
Salvia “Killer Cranberry” has red flowers. It comes from the cranberry bogs on Cape Cod where 70% of the cranberries in the world come from, and so they named this for those bogs. And yet it is not a bog sage! There are bog sages, but this is a drought-tolerant sage. Also, not from MA, it’s from TX. I think they misnamed it then.
Sollya heterophylla “Monterey Sapphire” has some very blue flowers. Known as a Bluebell Creeper because the flowers are, well you know, blue. And bell-shaped. And the plant creeps along low to the ground. Now look what you made me do, explain the obvious to you. Bluebell creeper! Blue! Bell! Creep! Er!
CACTUS JUNGLES ONLINE STORE – LOCAL DELIVERY
Subscribe to our Monthly Email
Join our Frequent Buyer Program on Fivestars
More Pictures on Instagram here!