Succulents and More™

Love at first sight is real, folks. One look at Lucinda Hutson's little purple house was all it took, and I was a goner.  It happened in early May at the 2018 Garden Bloggers Fling in Austin, Texas. Thanks to Lucinda, the color purple will forever be linked in my mind with her Casita Morada , her jewel box of a house built in the 1930s. Lucinda Hutson is not just a color picker extraordinaire, she's a passionate gardener, cookbook and lifestyle writer, and expert on spirits made from the humble agave: pulque, mescal, and above all tequila. Lucinda was born and raised in El Paso, Texas. She learned Spanish at an early age and, as a teen, frequently hung out in Juárez, El Paso's sibling on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande. 

Many of you are familiar with the palo verde, not least because of my obsession with it a few years ago (I did plant three in the front yard). Now I have another “palo” on my mind, this time palo blanco. While the common names of these two trees are similar—palo verde means “green stick” in Spanish and palo blanco means “white stick”—and both are in the pea family (Fabaceae), they’re not all that closely related. In addition, the common name palo verde is used for several species of Parkinsonia , while palo blanco refers to just one tree: Mariosousa willardiana , an acacia from the Mexican state of Sonora   (*). The first palo blanco I ever saw was at the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix, AZ. They have dozens of them throughout the garden. The photo below shows the small cluster in the Ottosen Entry Garden: These are about 12 ft. tall and have a little more to go. The adult size is 15-20 ft.; growth is fairly slow although supplemental water in the summer and fall is said t...

At the end of December, my older daughter and I made our annual winter trek to the University of California (UC) Botanical Garden in Berkeley. This has become somewhat of a tradition, seeing how we did the same thing in 2011 ( here and here ) and 2012 ( here , here and here ). While it’s getting harder to discover something new—especially since I tend to visit the same sections every time—it’s still great visiting old friends. I love the Yucca rostrata in front of the entrance… …and the Mexican weeping bamboo ( Otatea acuminata ‘Aztecorum’) right inside

This is the continuation of a three-part post about the University of California Botanical Garden (UCBG) in Berkeley. Part 1 was about the Southern Africa Collection . This post is about the New World Desert Collection. New World Desert Collection as seen from the hill that makes up the Southern Africa Collection This is how the UCBG web site describes the New World Desert Collection: Garden expeditions from the 1920s to the 1960s yielded many of the specimens in this collection, including desert plants from the southwestern United States, Mexico, and as far south as Chile and Argentina. Several beds feature plants from Mexico's Baja California peninsula. This collection is one of the oldest in the Garden. Deserts receive 25 cm (10 in) or less of rain each year. Many desert plants cannot tolerate our winter rains. Positioning the collection on a southwest-facing slope provides warmth and drainage critical to the survival of these plants. Plants from desert environments in ...

A few weeks ago I visited the Mexican Collection at the University of California Botanical Garden in Berkeley (UCBG). I expected to find all kinds succulents—agaves, yuccas, beschornerias—and I did. Dioon edule in Mexican Collection at UC Botanical Garden To my surprise and delight, I also came across several Dioon edule , a cycad species native to the eastern coast of Mexico where it grows in tropical deciduous thorn forests and oak woodlands. Its Spanish name, palma de la virgen , indicates that it is commonly thought of as a palm, but just like the sago palm ( Cycas revoluta ), it is as closely related to palm trees as a turnip, i.e. not much. Dioon edule in the landscape Image source: Wikipedia I’ve recently become somewhat enamored with cycads, as described in this post . After seeing Dioon edule at UCBG, I knew I wanted one. Even though it is one of the most common cycads, few nurseries in Northern California carry it, especially at this time of year. (I did se...

Last weekend, I visited the University of California Botanical Garden located on the campus of UC Berkeley to check out their ongoing plant clearance sale . After I had safely stowed my haul in my car, I decided to take a look at the Mexican and Central American collection, skipping my usual haunts, the Southern Africa section and the New World Desert . The Mexican and Central American collection recreates evergreen cloud forest and pine and oak woodland habitats. Most of it is forested, and lush ferns thrive in moist pockets. I’m not a tree expert, but many rare species of magnolias, pines and spruces are said to grow here. The main attraction for me were the succulents, the majority of which grow in sun-drenched clearings. Unlike the New World Desert, which looks like a man-made landscape, this section of the Garden has a very naturalistic look. It’s easy to forget that you’re in the Bay Area and not in some remote part of Mexico. The downside, if you can call it that, is that the...

We had a a busy weekend catching up on projects that had long been over due. As much as I love gardening, I’d rather be planning or planting than doing grunt work, but without the latter, it’s hard to do the former. Over the years, the bark we’d used as mulch in the planting strip outside the front yard fence had broken down or been washed away by the winter rains, and in quite a few spots the soil had begun to look like this: Cracked soil due to lack of mulch This planting strip gets full sun for 6-8 hours. Without a protective mulch, the plants would fry in our hot summer weather since water would just run off without really soaking in (the planting strip slants down to the street). On Friday I ordered bark from Dixon Landscape Materials in nearby Dixon, CA and on Saturday morning we went to work. 2 cubic yards of bark in our driveway (the decomposed granite is for another project that was supposed to happen this weekend but didn’t) In addition to keeping the so...

No, I didn’t go myself—I wish I could. Instead I did the next best thing: I watched a travelogue of somebody else’s trip. A few weeks ago, fellow bloggers Mark and Gaz at Alternative Eden posted a list of their favorite garden DVDs . It’s an impressive list with lots of DVDs that sounded interesting to me. Unfortunately, most of them are only available in the U.K. That’s a real shame, considering what a large market the U.S. and Canada are. One of these titles was particularly intriguing: Around the World in 80 Gardens , by British TV gardening personality Monty Don. I ordered the DVD set from Amazon UK, and it finally arrived. Monty Don’s visit to the surreal gardens of Las Pozas near Xilitla, Mexico Monty Don’s visit to the surreal gardens of Las Pozas near Xilitla, Mexico If you watched the introduction to Around the World in 80 Gardens above, you heard Monty talk about his own reassessment of what a garden is and whether it even needs plants. The gardens at Las Pozas are cer...