Succulents and More™

Gravity is a good thing. But too much of a good thing is not so good anymore. I’ve been battling an excess of gravity in the garden for a while. Here are the two most recent examples. Yucca queretaroensis (or, more likely, a naturally occurring hybrid between Yucca queretaroensis and Yucca filifera ) has become a signature plant in front of the house. It’s now over 7 ft. tall. But it’s not only grown in height, it’s also grown in lean. Call it the Leaning Yucca of Davis. Yucca queretaroensis today It gets plenty of sun, and yet it’s leaning towards the west as if to catch every last ray of sunshine. Lately, the lean has become more pronounced, as if gravity is pulling the (no doubt heavy) head down. I have no idea if (or when) it will eventually topple over, but it would definitely crush a few things in its path. The plants inside the yellow oval would get flattened if the yucca fell There’s nothing I do to make this Yucca queretaroensis straight. It’s simply too big and too heavy ...

As I described in this post , our ‘Desert Museum’ palo verde got blown over in a fierce winter storm on New Year’s Eve and landed on our minivan. Fortunately, there was no damage to the car or the plants next to the tree. We were able to cut it up for our biweekly yard waste pickup using a simple electric chainsaw. We were very lucky, considering the horrendous damage these storms and the record rainfall caused in the Sacramento area. The coast was hit even harder, with piers destroyed and roads washed out. At least 20 people were killed in the nine consecutive rainstorms that started on December 26. In light of that, our second tree calamity is a very minor footnote. For us, though, losing another tree is not a small matter, considering how few trees we have on our 8,100 sq.ft. lot. It all started when my wife noticed this on January 18: The root ball on our Acacia baileyana ‘Purpurea’ had started to lift up. These photos taken from the street show how much the tree was leaning t...

New Year’s Eve was rainy and extremely windy—University Airport on the edge of the University of California Davis campus recorded gusts close to 50 mph. In our backyard, the sun sail tore lose from two of its four anchor points, and the wind chimes were clanging like crazy. Thousands of households in Davis lost power from downed lines. Fortunately, we were spared, but when our friend, who’d been over for New Year’s Eve, was leaving, we saw this: Yep, that’s a tree on top of our van. Never a good thing! As it turned out, the trunk of our ‘Desert Museum’ palo verde had snapped off and the tree had fallen over. Here are some photos I took the next morning, New Year’s Day: The high winds also knocked most of the remaining Bearss limes into the gutter. We now have hundreds upon hundreds of limes, literally. If anybody local wants some, let me know! Back to our palo verde: Fortunately, what landed on the van was the top of the crown, not the much heavier trunk: At first glance, it didn’t see...