Everybody's a critic

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

❌ Web design that makes me nostalgic for MySpace

I decided to take it a bit further and prompt ChatGPT for a harsher critique. Funny for sure, but talk about snide!

A snarkier review

Succulents and More is basically the botanical equivalent of cornering you at a party to force-feed you an unsolicited slideshow of someone else’s vacation… except the vacation is to the same Home Depot succulent rack. Repeatedly.

You’d think a site called Succulents and More would wow you with insider care tips, cutting-edge plant trends, or, I don’t know, more than the usual “Look what I bought today” plus a blurry road trip pic of a cactus behind a chain-link fence. Instead, you get More… as in More photos of the same puya from eight angles. More selfies of agaves next to driveways. More overwrought captions about how there’s absolutely no more space in the garden — right before the next haul of 37 new agaves arrives.

The writing tries to be helpful but often reads like someone narrating their own impulse buying in real time. “Look at this puya! I shouldn’t have, but I did! Teehee!” Riveting stuff. The photo captions alone could double as passive-aggressive texts to their spouse about who maxed out the garden budget again.

And the site design? It’s not so much a blog as a time capsule from the golden age of Blogspot. White background, sidebar cluttered with dusty widgets nobody uses anymore, and enough text walls to repel even the most determined plant nerd. Want to find something? Good luck — it’s like hunting for a rare echeveria in a landfill.

Sure, you’ll stumble across the occasional gem: a great plant nursery visit, an obscure species spotlight. But you’ll need patience, stamina, and possibly a machete. Because Succulents and More is really just Succulents and the Same. Over. And over. And over.

If you want to see someone buy plants to soothe an insatiable succulent hoarding itch, congratulations — you’ve found the holy grail. For everyone else? May I suggest literally any other gardening blog?

What ChatGPT had to say did make me laugh, but I wonder if there’s a bit of truth to it. Maybe I do whine too much about not having any more space for plants — only to buy more plants. Maybe I should diversify and write about more than just agaves and friends. Maybe the site design is old-fashioned and should be updated (partial blame for what the blog looks like goes to Blogger/Google). Or maybe I should stick to my guns and continue doing what I’m doing.

At least I can rest easy knowing that I will be remembered after I croak, at least by ChatGPT.

Obituary: Gerhard Bock (????–Whenever His Garden Runs Out of Room)

The succulent world is reeling today at the news that Gerhard Bock of Davis, California — tireless chronicler of gravel mulch and the internet’s foremost enabler of impulse plant shopping — has finally shuffled off this mortal coil (or maybe just went on another nursery run and hasn’t come back yet).

Gerhard will be remembered for transforming what might have been a quiet suburban yard into a chaotic, prickly fortress of agaves, aloes, yuccas, and other spiky acquisitions that left visitors wondering if they’d stumbled into a small branch of the Arizona desert. His garden had more plants than the average botanical conservatory, fewer parking spaces than a food truck rally, and exactly zero square feet of unused soil at any given moment.

An early pioneer of the “I swear I have no more space, but here’s my new haul” genre of blogging, Gerhard’s Succulents and More gave the world an endless stream of driveway glamour shots, questionable plant decisions, and the occasional travelogue that proved he was capable of photographing plants even when he left his yard.

Gerhard is survived by:

• 17,542 agaves stuffed into 1,800 square feet.
• An HOA whose passive-aggressive letters are probably framed in the garage.
• A camera permanently attached to his right hand.
• Countless readers who know more about his mulch than their own families.

In lieu of flowers, mourners are asked to send donations to his surviving plants, who are still fighting each other for sunlight and root space. Or better yet, just drop off a rare puya in a plain brown box at his front door — it’s what he would have wanted.

Rest in peace, Gerhard. May your afterlife be filled with infinite garden space, zero snails, and a bottomless plant budget — though let’s be real, you’d still find a way to run out of room.

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