Succulents and More™

Last September I introduced you to the Wichmann family ( click here to read my post). They have created a dry garden in front of their mid-century modern house in Carmichael, a suburb of Sacramento. My frequent partner-in-crime Kyle and I recently caught up with the Wichmanns to see how their garden has evolved over the last year. The Wichmanns in their driveway, with a small strip of their dry garden on the left I love the curbside house number reflecting their home’s Streng Bros. heritage This post actually has photos from two different visits. The first set is from early June when the two ‘Desert Museum’ palo verdes in the front garden were in glorious bloom: A carpet of fallen petals under one of the palo verdes. So pretty. If you want a non-messy tree, ‘Desert Museum’ might not be the right choice for you. Actually, if you want no debris at all, you’re better off not planting any kind of tree. The second set of photos was taken in mid-July. The palo verdes were done with their f...

Last weekend, we had a small family reunion with my wife’s cousin from Alaska. Cousin S. has a great sense of humor and at one point decided to have ChatGPT roast my blog. The result was hilarious. Light-hearted roast of Succulents and More “Succulents and More”? More like Succulents and a Website from 2007. Who designed this — a cactus with Wi-Fi? Scrolling this site feels like walking through a nursery where the plants are fine but the signs are written in Comic Sans and confusion. Yes, there are succulents. There is more. But mostly… there’s more scrolling than anything else. I came for aloe, not a digital labyrinth. The navigation bar is about as intuitive as watering a lithops — you’re pretty sure you’re doing it right, but everything still looks dry. That homepage header image? Looks like it was shot with a potato and uploaded via dial-up. To be fair, if your target audience is “folks who still print out blog posts,” you’re absolutely nailing it. In summary: ✅ Great plant info ❌ ...

The first nursery we visited in Mount Shasta , Spring Hill Nursery, is in a park-like setting on the edge of town. Our second destination, Native Grounds Nursery, is just south of downtown at a location that has been home to a commercial nursery for over 100 years. Considering how fast things change, that’s a pretty remarkable legacy. But there’s something else that makes Native Grounds Nursery special: It has a beer garden! Technically, it belongs to a food truck called The Garden Tap , which has different owners, but it sits smack in the middle of the nursery grounds so it seems like the two businesses are one. The Garden Tap was closed when we were there (they’re open seasonally Thursday – Monday, 4pm – 9pm), but it was easy to imagine sitting there in the evening eating a pizza and enjoying a local craft brew. The nursery surrounds the food truck on three sides (the fourth side is the driveway and parking lot). The nursery carries everything from trees to annuals, edibles, perennia...