Succulents and More™

In our climate, we’re able to garden year round. Still, in December both plants and people slow down considerably. Not necessarily by choice, but when temperatures dip into the 40s and below, plant growth pretty much stops, and the gardener (me) becomes inconvenienced by the cold. The past two weeks have been dominated by bouts of rain followed by heavy gray skies, with very little sun. In the summer, when we have months of nothing but sunshine, we wish for an overcast day. Now that we have nothing but overcast, we wish for sun. That’s how it goes. This post is a collection of photos taken in the first half of December. There’s a little bit of this and that, just as the title of this post suggests. Late fall to early spring is aloe season. One of the first to bloom is Aloe lukeana . The specimen below (one of two in my garden) is almost there. If only we had a bit of sun, but this dreary grayness is forecast to last through Christmas. Aloe lukeana Quite a few aloes are pushing inflores...

In an early November post I talked about using bird netting to catch the leaves from our neighbor’s sycamore (a.k.a. London planetree, Platanus × hispanica ), preventing them from piling up in the aloes and agaves in our driveway bed. I don’t mind raking leaves that accumulate in the driveway proper, but getting them out of spiny and spiky plants is a tedious and painful chore I want to minimize as much as I can. Now, six weeks later, I’m happy to report that the netting did exactly what I was hoping it would do. After a few storms with high winds, our neighbor’s sycamore is almost bare. Not entirely, but what’s left shouldn’t be much of a problem. Sycamore after dropping most of its leaves Let’s take a look at the results after removing the netting. This is the top end of the driveway bed. Leaves have piled up along either side of the bed, but those are easy to rake up. Leaves on either side... Just a few leaves ended up in the middle, between plants. Most importantly, none accumul...

While most of the posts on Succulents and More are about succulents, some fall into the “more” category. This is one of them. My love affair with the Proteaceae family (informally referred to as “proteas”) goes back a long time. Over the years. I’ve grown the most common members in my garden: Protea , Leucadendron , and Leucospermum from South Africa as well as Banksia , Grevillea , and Hakea from Australia. As beautiful as they are, they do have some special requirements you need to know in order to be successful with them. Above all, they’re intolerant of too much phosphorus in the soil so general-purpose fertilizers can harm or even kill them. (They still need phosphorus, just not at the levels usually present here in California.) In Australia and South Africa, protea fertilizer is widely available. Not so here. Until recently, nobody in the U.S. manufactured fertilizer specially formulated for proteas. My friend Troy McGregor, Australian-born plantsman extraordinaire and owner o...

My posts sometimes assume a fairly advanced level of knowledge. Many of you have that, but others might feel a bit left out. To remedy that, I decided to do a series of more basic posts. Hopefully they’ll be useful for readers who are new to succulents without boring folks who are already familiar with the topic discussed. In this installment of Succulents 101, I’m giving you a brief overview of how plants are named. Naming plants can be a prickly affair Botanical names are the formal names used to classify and identify plants. They follow a standardized system called binomial nomenclature , developed by Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778). Carl Linnaeus in 1775 Here are the key concepts: Binomial structure Botanical names consist of two parts: – Genus: The first word, always capitalized, indicates the genus, i.e. the group of closely related species. – Species: The second word, written in lowercase, indicates the individual species within the genus. Example: Agave a...

In August, I blogged about an agave snout weevil infestation in a friend’s house a couple of blocks away. I was definitely concerned about the agaves in my garden, but I didn’t notice any suspicious signs at the time. Maybe I didn’t take it seriously enough, didn’t look carefully. If I was too complacent, I no longer am now. The day of reckoning has come, because the agave snout weevil is officially here. Agave shawii × potatorum , a beautiful hybrid by Jeremy Spath I began with me noticing that the Agave shawii × potatorum in the front yard looked a bit lopsided. Granted, Agave shawii and hybrids involving Agave shawii often have a bit of a lean to them, as if they’re reaching for the sun. But the angle on this particular plant was more pronounced than you would expect. Sure enough, when I nudged it, it wiggled every which way – an agave firmly rooted into the ground wouldn’t do that. It took very little effort to lift the entire plant straight up. This is what I found on the unde...

My posts sometimes assume a fairly advanced level of knowledge. Many of you have that, but others might feel a bit left out. To remedy that, I decided to do a series of more basic posts. Hopefully they’ll be useful for readers who are new to succulents without boring folks who are already familiar with the topic discussed. This installment of Succulents 101 is about the differences between aloes and agaves. Both are strikingly beautiful succulents often mistaken for each other because of their similar appearance. However, they belong to completely different plant families and have distinct characteristics. Aloe wickensii (in flower) and Aloe hereroensis to the left of it. The plants at top right and bottom left are agaves, the plant at top left is a yucca. Before I go into the key similarities and differences, here are some easy tells to distinguish between aloes and agaves: ❉ Easy tells In flower, aloes and agave look very different. There’s no confusing the two. See below for examp...