Succulents and More™

A couple of weeks ago, I had the opportunity to visit a very special garden in the Berkeley Hills. Owner Ben, who follows my blog, had extended an invitation to drop by, and I gladly took him up on it. Based on the location and some photos Ben had emailed me, my expectations were high, but the reality far exceeded them. You’ll see why in this post and in part 2 to follow later this week (I took so many pictures, I had to spread them out over two posts.) Ben and his wife bought the property in the late 1990s. The original house had been destroyed in the 1991 Oakland Hills firestorm , like 2,800 other single-family dwellings. The house on Ben’s property was rebuilt, but the two properties next door weren’t. When Ben and his wife bought the property, there wasn’t much landscaping, just a patio area behind the house. The steep hillside beyond was an expanse of weeds. Ben knew that making a garden here wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, but he persisted. By a stroke of luck, Ben befrien...

Unlike some gardeners, I don’t have a large collection of tools. But what I do have gets put to good use. Here are the six tools I use the most: Root Slayer shovel As you may remember from  this post , the handle on my original Root Slayer cracked recently, but the manufacturer, Radius Garden, replaced it under their lifetime warranty. Lifetime warranty aside, the Root Slayer (I have model 22011) has been my favorite shovel since I got it in 2017. I use it for everything from removing plants to digging holes. The rip-saw teeth along the sides of the shovel blade are very sharp and slice through roots like a knife through butter (well, almost). If I ever got shipwrecked on an island, that’s the one tool I’d want to have with me. Long tweezers It’s a cruel twist of irony or a bad cosmic joke, but spiky plants are a magnet for debris. If you’ve ever tried to pull dry leaves or other detritus from the rosette of an agave, you know of which I speak. Attempting to do it with your hands,...

The majority of mangaves you find in retail nurseries come from Walters Gardens and are sold under their Mad About Mangave brand. In addition, you might come across a couple of mangaves from Altman Plants at Lowe’s or The Home Depot (like ‘Barney’ and ‘Tequila Fire’). But there’s quite a bit of mangave breeding going on away from the commercial mainstream. Backyard growers and hobbyists have begun to make their own hybrids, either creating entirely new crosses or building on existing ones. Many mangaves flower at relatively young age so there’s plenty of opportunity to use them as pollen or seed parents. For example, Brian Kemble, the curator of the Ruth Bancroft Garden , has created several new mangaves based on his own manfreda hybrids. You can see them planted out in the garden, including this × Mangave ‘Blue Fountain’ . Nick Deinhart, known primarily for his aloe hybrids, has made some striking crosses involving ×Mangave ‘Bloodspot’ and Agave titanota . My friend Justin Thiel rec...