Succulents and More™

Black Friday sales are great for people buying electronics, appliances and maybe clothes, but usually there's nothing special about them for gardeners. This year was different. For the first time, the Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek ran a Black Friday sale. And what a sale it was: 50% off on available plants in the retail nursery! It started on Friday—the day after Thanksgiving—and was supposed to end today, Sunday. Except it didn’t. If you kicked yourself because you thought you missed it, I have good news: The sale has been extended until 4pm on Thursday, December 4, 2014. That means you have  three more days to shop: Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday (the Garden and nursery are closed on Mondays).

I love books. Fiction or non-fiction, I devour them all. I have over 50 books on and under my bedside table, all waiting to be read. That’s in addition to the thousands of books scattered all over the house. I’ve joked about the second story of our house collapsing under the weight of the books stored up there. Whenever I’m in a bookstore, I head straight for the clearance bin to see what treasures I might find at a deeply discounted price. I love to be able to save 50, 60 or 70% off the cover price. 80% is dreamy. 90% is nirvana (and exceedingly rare). But in brick-and-mortar bookstores most clearance books are popular fiction, with just a smattering of non-fiction titles and even fewer gardening books. Now imagine a place where you can find hundreds of gardening books at up to 90% off the cover price! And you don’t have to leave the comfort of home to shop there. This place is called HamiltonBook.com . 15, 20 years ago, I used to pour over their mail-order catalog—densely printed o...

The University of California Davis campus has several aloe hot spots (see this post from February). Curious to find out whether any of their aloes are flowering yet, I decided to go on a little outing yesterday. (Weekends are best for a campus visit since parking is free.) As always, I parked next to the Botanical Conservatory greenhouses and began my walk there. This is what I found.   The flower spikes on the tall Aloe littoralis in front of the greenhouse are further along than I’d thought… …while this Aloe littoralis …

Don’t get me wrong, I love trees and I know that falling leaves come with the territory. But while I like autumn, I don’t enjoy dealing with this: The photos above and below were taken standing in our neighbor’s driveway, looking towards our house. So while technically these leaves are on her property, they’re just waiting for the wind to carry them onto ours.

Like yesterday, today has been a gloomy, gray day with on-and-off-again rain. Not much, but enough to get everything wet. Yeah for the rain—we desperately need it—but it prevented me from taking photos for another post I had in mind. Gates Pass west of Tucson So I’m going to dig into my ever expanding image archive and pull out some photos from my recent trips to Arizona ( 2012 | 2013 ). This doesn’t come out of nowhere: I’m actually planning another trip to Phoenix and Tucson at the end of December. Tohono Chul Park : horse sculpture by Kioko Mwitiki in the Cactus Circle Garden surrounded by Mexican fencepost cacti ( Pachycereus marginatus ) While I’m going to revisit some favorite places, like the Desert Botanical Garden in Phoenix and the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum in Tucson, I’m also going to check out new gardens and nurseries. In fact, since I’ll be driving this time, I’ll have plenty of room to buy plants. Bach’s Cactus Nursery, Tucson If you have any recommendati...

Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day, a meme originally introduced by May Dreams Gardens , is the 15th of each month. I usually miss it, being as unorganized as I am. This month, however, I’m only two days off, so I thought it would be nice to take a look at what’s blooming in my mid-November garden. Aloe cryptopoda against ‘Desert Museum’ palo verde ( Parkinsonia ‘Desert Museum’). This aloe was already blooming in mid-September when Loree ‘Danger Garden’ Bohl photographed it ( click here to read her write-up about my garden) and it’s still not quite done. Great going! Callistemon citrinus ‘Little John’. I’m including it because it’s currently residing in our front yard although it technically belongs to friends. I picked it up for them while they’re out of town. (It’s in a 5-gallon nursery can.)

I’ve been to most botanical gardens in Northern California but one had eluded me until this week: Quarryhill Botanical Garden. It is located outside the small town of Glen Ellen , best known as the home of writer Jack London (he lived there on a 1,000 acre ranch until his death in 1916). While less than an hour and a half from my house, Quarryhill is tucked away in rural Sonoma County where I rarely go. Not sure why, it’s beautiful there. I almost missed the entrance, tucked away as it is between cabernet sauvignon vineyards I knew that Quarryhill is world-renowned for its collection of Asian plants, many of them endangered in their native habitats. What I didn’t know is that the garden is only 27 years old. It’s the brainchild of restaurant heiress Jane Davenport Jansen who donated the site (25 acres) and financed 15 plant collection expeditions to Asia until her untimely death in 2000 at the age of 60. Read this very interesting article from Pacific Horticulture Magazine for mor...

Yesterday was Veterans Day , one of the few public holidays we have in the U.S. I played hooky and went on a road trip with a friend to Sonoma , just a little over an hour from Davis. After exploring Quarryhill Botanical Garden outside the small town of Glen Ellen (separate post to come) we stopped in downtown Sonoma for coffee. I found a parking space right across from Mission San Francisco Solano and took some photos as the late-afternoon sun was casting a golden glow on the mission’s white façade. I noticed several things I’d never paid attention to before. The tree all the way on the left is a pomegranate, a tree that has a long association with California missions. While pomegranates are native to Persia (now Iran), they were brought to California by Spanish missionaries and settlers.

The front yard—at least the planting strip outside the 4-foot fence—is continuing the transformation that started when we removed the Pittosporum tobira hedge and created a mounded “desert garden” instead (I’ve consolidated all the posts relating to this project here ). Some of the grasses and perennials that have been in place for years had outgrown their allotted spots, and keeping them away from the sidewalk was getting to be a chore. Plus, the constant whacking required didn’t exactly produce visually attractive results, as you can see in the “before” picture below. Before (the floppy monster is Pennisetum orientale ‘Karley Rose’ after our recent rain ) Usually I wait before I have at least a semi-solid plan in my head before I take action, but in this case, impatience won out. In the space of one day (this past Saturday), I removed the ‘Karley Rose’ grass, two Gaura lindheimeri and a variegated Calamagrostis  × acutiflora 'Karl Foerster', and I trimmed back a bunch of...

Loree Bohl over at Danger Garden started the “ favorite plant of the week ” meme a few years ago. Many other garden bloggers have followed suit. I’ve done a few “plant of the week” posts but never with any kind of regularity. Today’s post is one of those once-in-a-blue-moon plant portraits. My favorite plant this week is Aeonium hierrense . I bought it in a 4-inch pot at Annie’s Annuals in July 2011 based on this description : Super rare & possibly the most majestic of all Aeoniums, this giant boasts impressive red-edged, long-leaved rosettes to 30” across atop thick, tropicalesque stalks to 3’ tall. Handsomely patterned in olive green & white, they look like designer palm trunks! After 3 or more years, it bursts into a pyramidal head of pink & white starry blooms. It’s monocarpic, so after blooming it will pass away (hopefully leaving behind lots of seed!).To our knowledge we are the first nursery in the U.S. to offer this elephant-sized & imposing species - possi...