Succulents and More™

Most gardeners have never heard of farfugiums. They are wonderful shade-tolerant foliage plants from Japan, and I’ve been in love with them for a number of years. I blogged about them several times before ( 1 2 ) and will do another post in the fall. My UK-based friends Mark and Gaz at Alternative Eden just published a fantastic post about their farfugium collection, which contains almost every cultivar currently available in the West. Rumor has it that Japanese breeders have developed other cultivars that haven’t made it to our shores yet so there’s definitely more to look forward to in the years to come. If you like large-leaved plants with exotic appeal, be sure to check out this post at Alternative Eden!

 

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At this time of year, I water our potted succulents once a week. Sometimes I do it leisurely, inspecting each plant for new growth or just admiring their form; sometimes I’m rushed and try to get it done as quickly as possible. Three weekends ago I must have been rushed and not paid much attention to what was going on. This became very apparent when I noticed the following week that our sempervivum bowl had the worst case of mealybug infestation I’d ever seen on a succulent. I immediately sprayed with neem oil, which is typically quite effective, and quarantined the bowl to a far corner of the yard. When I checked back a few days later, most plants were dead—I hadn’t caught the infestation early enough. I might have been able to save a few plants, but I decided to just dump the entire content of the bowl into the garbage can and start over. The thought of trying to salvage anything was too discouraging and just plain unappealing. Severe mealybug infestation on hens-and-chicks ( Semp

One of my favorite small cacti is Parodia magnifica , commonly called ball or balloon cactus for the shape of its body. When you think about it, that’s not the most imaginative name since thousands of other cacti are ball-shaped, too. I wonder who gets to decide on a plant’s common name??? What I love about Parodia magnifica is the bluish gray coloration of the body—although mine has gotten more green lately—combined with the fine, almost furry spines that are more bristly than spiky. I think it’s a beautiful cactus even when young and solitary. As it matures, it may form  a clump that becomes ever more impressive as it ages. Clump of Parodia magnifica at Ruth Bancroft Gardens, Walnut Creek, CA I bought my Parodia magnifica on closeup at Lowe’s earlier this year. For some reason, Lowe’s closed out a big portion of their succulents in February, only to restock them a couple of months later. Their loss, my gain. Parodia magnifica in February when its skin had a pronounced

In April, I received a bunch of cactus seedlings from fellow garden blogger Alan in St Louis. He had chronicled their early days on his fantastic blog It’s Not Work, It’s Gardening ( 1 2 3 4   5   6 ). In the four months since they’ve been living at our house, some have put on a tremendous amount of growth while others have been much slower. I guess it all depends on the genus and species. Some cacti, like prickly pears (opuntias) are much faster growing than, say, saguaros. According to the seed packet, these seedlings could be any number of things: saguaro, hedgehog, fishhook barrel, dollar prickly pear, desert prickly pear, christmas cholla, cane cholla, Santa Rita prickly pear, cardon. There is no way of making a positive identification until they are much bigger. Anyway, let’s take a look at these spiky fur balls: Some of the seedlings in early May… …and in mid-August These are clearly columnar cacti, and they’re also the ones with the brightest color. The

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the clumping bamboos in our front yard. They’ve put on tremendous growth this year. Just how much was brought home this morning when I looked out the upstairs loft window. There are more new culms than I bothered to count, and they haven’t even leafed out yet. Once they have, the view from upstairs will be very different for sure! Left (back): Bambusa oldhamii Middle: Bambusa chungii ‘Barbellata’ Right: Bambusa multiplex ‘Alphonse Karr’ Our giant clumping timber bamboo ( Bambusa oldhamii ), the darker green bamboo on the left, has five new culms that range from 1½ to 2 inches in diameter. They’re not visible from this angle yet, but once they’ve reached their final height, our neighbor’s front yard might be almost invisible. I love all this growth—that’s the reason why we planted bamboo in the first place—but it is a bit scary to think that it will continue next year, and the year after… I will definitely cut back on the fertilizer and may

Whenever I go to our local ACE Hardware store, I walk through their garden center. The selection is fairly mainstream but they do carry a good and frequently changing selection of 3" and 4" plants from Lone Pine Gardens , a specialty succulent nursery in Sebastopol, California—the same town where Bamboo Sourcery and Hardcore Espresso are located, two businesses I’ve blogged about before. I often walk away with a new addition to our cactus collection, and this Sunday was no different. I ended up buying a Gymnocalycium friedrichii , a small globose cactus from northwestern Paraguay that is actually quite hardy (down to USDA zone 8). I had eyed this species all summer, and this time ACE had nice-sized plants in 4” pots that were getting ready to bloom. This is what the cactus looked like when I bought in on Sunday:   Today the flowers opened up in all their pink glory. While pink isn’t a favorite color of mine, it does complement the reddish hue of the cactus itself.

 

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Our garden has made great progress in the last few years, but its appeal rests almost entirely on the plants we’ve chosen and the way we’ve combined them. One major frontier remains largely unexplored: garden ornaments, or yard art. Last year we added a few Asian-themed ornaments, but other than that I had always thought our garden would look better unadorned. Granite lantern in the Koyabu style Cast-concrete Guanyin head Craftsman style granite lantern next to Fargesia robusta However, the more gardens I visit—either in person or on the web—the more curious I become about the possibilities of giving our garden a unique character through ornaments. While I have a soft spot for whimsy and kitsch, such as the cow and mannequin at Annie’s Annuals in Richmond, CA, they wouldn’t feel right in our garden even if we had the room. Cow at Annie’s Annuals Life-size mannequin at Annie’s Annuals The space that has provided the most inspiration is Mark and Gaz’s

When we bought our house in 1997, the front yard was “graced” by two Bradford pear trees ( Pyrus calleryana ‘Bradford’). Once considered a near-perfect street tree—it grows fast, it’s hardy, tough and drought tolerant, and it has pretty white flowers in the spring and beautiful red foliage in the fall—the reality is that as the tree ages, its limbs become too heavy and break off from their weak attachment points. One of our neighbors had a Bradford pear that split in the middle, luckily missing the house as it broke apart. As if that genetic disposition to breakage wasn’t bad enough, our Bradford pears were also infested with mistletoe, weakening them even more. We were already concerned because bits and pieces had been breaking off over the years, but one sunny and calm Sunday morning in the fall of 2009, an entire limb broke off of one tree and fell across the street, almost touching the sidewalk on the other side. Luckily, no cars had been parked in front of our house or our neighb