Succulents and More™

If you were amazed by the quantity and variety of plants Andy Siekkinen has in his backyard in San Diego, get ready to have your mind blown again. As I mentioned, Andy also rents greenhouse space at a wholesale grower in another location in San Diego County. A good half of that greenhouse is occupied by a wide range of bromeliads: aechmeas, billbergias, canistrums, neoregelias, you name it. The other side of the greenhouse contains the bulk of Andy’s hechtia collection, most likely the largest of its kind in the country. It’s complemented by other spiky terrestrial bromeliads such as encholiriums, orthophytums, and sincoraeas. Most of these “exotics” I’d only ever encountered online and in books; it was a real pleasure seeing them up close. Andy is working on propagating many of them so they will become available for purchase at some point in the future. Below is the half of the greenhouse dedicated to “softer” bromeliads; I put “softer” in quotes because even billbergias and neoregel...