Succulents and More™

This is a continuation of my previous post featuring random pictures from around Santa Barbara. To see other posts from my recent trip, click here . Aloes As I mentioned earlier , Agave attenuata , the foxtail agave, was the most common landscape succulent we saw in Santa Barbara. But there were plenty of aloes as well. The ones that were in flower were immediately noticeable. We spotted many Aloe arborescens , but for some reason neither Kyle nor I took a single photo (they’re pretty boring). I did take photos of Aloe ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ , lots of them. Last year, Randy Baldwin of San Marcos Growers told me about a mass planting of ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ in a local business park. I featured it in this January 2025 post , together with a spectacular display of Aloe ‘Birds and Bees’ in another commercial landscape nearby. I wanted Kyle to see both of these plantings so we stopped there after we left San Marcos Growers on Friday afternoon. Unfortunately, the ‘Birds and Bees’ were past their prim...

Before I start going into detail about the places Kyle and I visited on our Santa Barbara trip last weekend, here’s a collection of pictures from around town. They’re a bit random, but there is a theme: aloes and agaves. They’re everywhere in Santa Barbara. We stayed in a small vacation rental in the Mesa neighborhood . The location was insane: just a block from a bluff that overlooks the ocean. The nearest beach access was an easy 10-minute walk — plus a steep climb down 1,000 steps to the eponymous One Thousand Steps Beach . Well, it did feel like 1,000 steps, but in reality it was only 157 steps (I looked it up). Steps down to One Thousand Steps Beach I’ll show you some sunset photos of One Thousand Steps Beach a little later , but let’s begin with one plant that is positively everywhere in Santa Barbara: the foxtail agave ( Agave attenuata ). Up here in the Sacramento Valley, we have to protect Agave attenuata against the sun in the summer and the cold in the winter. A dip into ...