Santa Barbara Sunday: Aloe 'Birds and Bees'

This is installment 3 of “Santa Barbara Sunday,” a special feature running for the next month or so, each installment focusing on a different notable destination in Santa Barbara.

When I was in Santa Barbara last month, I saw many cool plants, including spectacular aloes, but my favorite was an aloe hybrid I’d never even heard of before: Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’. Introduced by San Marcos Growers in Santa Barbara in 2013, it’s from seed Brian Kemble collected at the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek. According to the San Marcos Growers website, it is:

A large shrubby succulent that grows to 6 feet tall or more by as wide with rosettes of 18 inch long thick gray-green recurved leaves, but can be trimmed up to make a single stemmed small tree-like plant. …

Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ is a selection made at our nursery from seedlings that were grown from open pollinated seed provided to us in March 2007 by Brian Kemble of the Ruth Bancroft Botanic Garden. The seed parent of this hybrid was Aloe arborescens and its pollen parent is speculated to be Aloe thraskii. From the original seed that germinated we selected and evaluated 5 seedlings and chose this one for its attractive bicolored flowers, naming it ‘Birds and Bees’ in reference to its open pollination.

Randy Baldwin, the manager of San Marcos Growers, told me about a mass planting of Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ at an office park in Goleta. Of course I had to see for myself. And I was stunned by what I found:

Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’, with Agave titanota, and Agave lophantha ‘Quadricolor’

As an Aloe arborescens hybrid, ‘Birds and Bees’ tends to be a shrubby thing with many stems and heads. However, the landscapers in charge of this office park decided to train it into a single-stemmed aloe by removing all the offsets – an ongoing task, I imagine, but well worth the periodic effort because the result is nothing short of sensational. Even Randy Baldwin was impressed; he’d never seen ‘Birds and Bees’ grown like this before.

According to Randy, the landscaping company bought the plants for this project from San Marcos Growers in 2018: 18 Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ in 5-gallon cans, as well as Aloe ‘Rooikappie’, Agave titanota, and Agave lophantha ‘Quadricolor’. The plants have been maintained impeccably. In fact, a couple of landscapers were busy at work when I stopped by. And they did something that totally surprised me: They lifted up their leaf blowers and blew out the debris that had collected in the heads of ‘Birds and Bees’. The heads are a good 5 feet from the ground, mind you, so this takes effort. I’ve never seen this kind of dedication from the landscapers working in our neighborhood!

I’ll admit that when writing this post I didn’t try to exercise any kind of self-control. As a result, you’ll see a lot of photos of the same aloe. But with one this beautiful, why limit yourself to two or three pictures. Especially when there are 18 specimens to photograph, all of them in full bloom. And the flowers are showstoppers.

According to San Marcos Growers, “we have only tested [Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’] to 27° F, but likely it can go at least a few degrees colder.” That would make it suitable for much of lower-elevation California.

You can see the scars where the offsets were removed

Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ is only available from San Marcos Growers. As a wholesale nursery, they don’t sell to the public, but many independent nurseries and garden centers in California carry their plants. If you want your own ‘Birds and Bees’, check with a nursery in your area to see if they can order it from San Marcos Growers.

© Gerhard Bock, 2024. All rights reserved. To receive all new posts by email, please subscribe here.