Succulents and More™

We can grow many things in zone 9b, but for some plants, our winters are too mild . This includes tulips. Hybrid tulips, in particular — the showy, often gaudy and over-the-top kind. Sure, you can buy tulip bulbs in any nursery or garden center at this time of year, but the odds of success are middling at best. The reason is that hybrid tulips need a long, consistent cold period to trigger the hormonal process that develops flower buds. Even pre-chilled bulbs, sold at a premium, typically decline after a few years even if you do everything right: lift them at the end of spring, keep them dry all summer, and then put them in the fridge in September for 8 or 10 weeks before planting them out again. Tulip house in Victoria, British Columbia. A common sight in many places, you’d never see a sea of tulips in mild-winter California. Species tulips, or wild tulips, are a different story. They are the original, naturally occurring ancestors found in a vast region stretching from the Mediterran...

I first met Kipp McMichael in May 2024 when he led a calochortus field trip for the California Horticultural Society . A web developer by profession and a naturalist at heart, his knowledge of these native bulbs with exquisite (and ephemeral) flowers is encyclopedic, However, as I have since found out, his expertise goes much further. His streetside crevice garden in Berkeley is a wonderland of succulents combined with cycads, California natives, and all manner of geophytes beyond calochortus. Kipp’s succulent crevice garden along busy Ashby Avenue in Berkeley (March 2025) Note: When I say “Kipp’s garden,” I’m referring to the succulent garden accessible from the street. This is not a large space, but there’s more to see here than in some gardens five times larger. Behind the house is a completely different kind of garden; I’ll show you a few photos in a separate post. March 2025 Panayoti Kelaidis, Senior Curator and Director of Outreach of Denver Botanic Gardens and a world-renowned...