Succulents and More™

One of my gardening goals for 2026 is to critically assess every plant in the garden, especially in the coveted sidewalk bed in the front, and be ruthless: Any plant that doesn’t do it for me anymore gets pulled and replaced with something more compelling. I know, that sounds a bit silly, but it’s what I need to do to keep things exciting. As with any new year’s resolution, there’s no guarantee that it will last, but I’m determined to at least give it a try. And I’m happy to report that I’ve completed the first removal of the year. My target was the blob in the middle: Nolina texana It’s Texas beargrass or sacahuiste ( Nolina texana ). As Wikipedia puts it so poetically, Nolina texana “is a plant in the asparagus family that resembles a large clump of grass.” That’s what it looks like although it isn’t a grass at all but rather a relative of agaves, yuccas, and dasylirions. My Nolina texana was just a little thing when I brought it home in my suitcase from the 2018 Garden Bloggers F...

My friend Michele is one of the most enthusiastic plant peeps I know. She lives in a small planned unit development complex here in Davis where the homeowners’ association manages common areas, including the front yards. As I mentioned in this post from June 2022 , Michele was given permission to create her own water-wise landscaping. Michele in front of a mystery aloe she received from a friend, possibly a hybrid between Aloe maculata and Aloe barbadensis (aka the “real” aloe vera) In my original post, the divider between the parking spaces (see below) was all mangaves. They’re gone now, either because they bloomed out or got too big. The current iteration of the divider is all aloes: Aloe ‘Safari Rose’ Aloe ‘Tingtinkie’ The area next to the parking lot is a mixture of succulents, perennials, and shrubs. Most are still small; they’ll be fantastic in a year or two. Last year, Michele converted the strip outside her backyard fence into a mound. It’s now home to a variety of cool pla...

With cold nights and sunny days, the weather is pretty much back to what you would expect for this time of year. There isn’t much going on right now, so I decided to take a look at what the garden was like in early January last year, the year before, etc. Memories fade, but the blog is here to help me remember. For each year, I’m giving the nighttime low, the daytime high, and the mean low and mean high as per the UC Davis Weather & Climate Station . 2025 Nighttime low: 29° (January 21) Daytime high: 70° (January 10) Mean: low 38°, high 62° Nights below freezing: 7 I could have sworn that aloe flowers were further along a year ago. They were, a little (surprising, considering it was a fairly cold month), but not as much as I had thought. Aloe excelsa , January 2025 Aloe excelsa , January 2026 Aloe speciosa × barberae , January 2025. It didn’t flower at all last year... ...but it will this year Eastern end of the sidewalk bed — January 2025 January 2026 — it looks pretty much th...