Succulents and More™

Will buying a “Smart Plant” make me smart, too?

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...

After exploring the Huntington Desert Garden with its Old World and New World sections, I made a brief stop at the Desert Garden Conservatory. For some inexplicable reason, I didn’t take a photo of the entire structure, so this is all I can show you of the outside: It’s basically a large old-fashioned greenhouse. As the sign below explains, it houses about 3,000 succulents and caudiciforms that need special protection, be it from the cold, from the rain, or from people.

My wife and mother-in-law just got back from a trip to Savannah, Georgia and Beaufort, South Carolina. One of the most stunning sights were the avenues of oaks at antebellum plantations . Here is the one at Tomotley in Sheldon, South Carolina: Tomotley Plantation, Sheldon, SC; October 24, 2015 © Heather B Bock Coincidentally, while they were gone I photographed this scene right here in Davis on one of the loveliest residential streets in town (no Spanish moss though):

Everybody knows tequila, and agave syrup has become a mainstream alternative to sugar or corn syrup-based sweeteners. Still, since agaves are my favorite plants, I’m always on the lookout for new ways this eminently useful plant might enrich my life. Over the weekend I found myself in the cleaning products aisle at Costco. Not a place I often go, but I needed to buy scrub sponges. Usually I get the blue ones but these tan-and-brown ones with the neon green accents on the wrapper immediately caught my attention. Good color choice, Scotch Brite! What does this have to do with agaves, you might be wondering. Rightfully so.

In my previous post I covered the Old World section of the Huntington Desert Garden. It’s located near the top of a rise, adjacent to the Desert Garden Conservatory . From here the land gently slopes downward towards the New World section. On a cold night, the temperature difference between the top of the rise and the bottom can be as much as five degrees (source: The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington , see below). This greatly benefits the aloes, many of which are quite tender. Clearly, the cacti and other New World succulents planted further down the slope are better able to handle the colder temperatures—not that it ever gets truly cold in Pasadena (zone 10a). While the plants in the Desert Garden are roughly separated by location (Old World, New World) and some beds are dedicated to regional flora (Sonoran and Chihuahuan Desert; California desert; Madagascar; etc.), there is some overlap. According to The Botanical Gardens at the Huntington (see below) the overarching principl...

On December 27, 2014 I finally had the opportunity to visit the Huntington in San Marino, CA , one of California’s great estates. Established by businessman Henry Huntington in the early 1900s on what was originally a 600-acre ranch, the Huntington comprises a world-class library , art collections and 120 acres of gardens . Foxtail agaves ( Agave attenuata ‘Boutin Blue’), some of them in flower. Behind it is a mature tree aloe ( Aloidendron barberae ). The most famous of these is the 10-acre Desert Garden. It was started in 1907 when garden superintendent William Hertrich convinced Henry Huntington to plant cacti in an area where little else would grow. Huntington initially agreed to let Hertrich experiment on ½ acre. Hertrich went ahead at full steam, filling the ½ acre lot with 300 cactus. In 1908, Hertrich hauled three carloads of saguaros from Arizona, followed in 1912 by two carloads of cacti and other succulents from Mexico. Huntington was finally convinced and gave Hert...

The photo below shows three potted succulents in the backyard. The one on the left is Agave lophantha ‘Quadricolor’, pupping away merrily (the “mother plant” here is itself an offset from the original mother). The one in the middle, in the hollowed-out pumice rock, is Agave bracteosa ‘Calamar’, a solitary cultivar of the squid agave, which normally forms large clumps. On the right is Aloe sinkatana , a non-demanding small aloe from Sudan that blooms several times a year.

One of the permanent fixtures of the front yard are two moss green urns on either side of the front door. We’ve had them since 2007 and they’ve been home to a variety of things, including feather reed grass ( Calamagrostis × acutiflora ‘Karl Foerster’) and Golden Goddess bamboo ( Bambusa multiplex ‘Golden Goddess’). December 21, 2009: green urns with Golden Goddess bamboo ( Bambusa multiplex ‘Golden Goddess’). Unfortunately, when the bamboos got larger, I couldn’t keep them watered enough to look good. In their most recent incarnations, the urns contained a variety of aeoniums (cuttings from the backyard). They looked good from fall through spring. In the summer, however, aeoniums go dormant and look terrible. So ultimately, they turned out to be the wrong choice for this prominent spot. The straw that broke the camel’s back was a nasty mealybug infestation, especially in the urn on the right side. I let it go longer than I should have, but this morning I finally decided to spring ...

It’s been six months since I last talked about the desert bed in the front yard (technically outside the backyard fence on the street side). As a quick reminder, this is what this area was like until February 2014: February 16. 2014 before the Pittosporum tobira hedge came down After planting it initially looked sparse: March 16, 2014 right after planting But not for long. Just six months later many of the plants (especially the perennials) had exploded. A year later I had already removed some of them because they were crowding out the succulents. Now, a year and a half after we created this bed, the succulents have put on enough size to become more noticeable; give it another year and they’ll be standouts. October 16, 2015 Let’s take a closer look at the plants.