Succulents and More™

The San Francisco Succulent & Cactus Society (SFSCS) usually meets at the San Francisco County Fair Building in Golden Gate Park. The February meeting last Tuesday was an exception: It was held at the Ruth Bancroft Garden (RBG) in Walnut Creek, one of my favorite places to visit. I don’t often make it to the regular SFSCS meetings because Golden Gate Park is a good 1½ hour drive, even longer if traffic is bad (it often is). The RBG, on the other hand, is just an hour away, which makes it a much more convenient destination for me. The RBG is usually closed on Tuesdays, and they opened it just for us. The activities started at 4 pm with a tour of the garden. There were three options: a tour focused on the history of the garden, another on cacti, and the third on aloes. That’s the group I joined. It was led by RBG curator Brian Kemble, who showed us many of the aloes currently in bloom. Brian has been with the RBG for over 40 years and has an encyclopedic knowledge of succulents. I...

While the Ruth Bancroft Garden  (RBG) in Walnut Creek, CA is a great place to visit at any time of year, it's particularly beautiful right now. The photo below shows you why: Many of the aloes are in bloom. The RBG has an extensive collections of aloes, both species and hybrids. Brian Kemble, the garden's long-time curator, is a world-renowned aloe expert and has been creating hybrids for decades, many of which are planted out at the RBG. Last Saturday I had the opportunity to get into the RBG at 7:30 am as part of an open photography session. My earlier post  highlights the breadth of succulents on display at the RBG. This post is all about aloes. It's not meant to be comprehensive; it simply showcases the aloes that caught my eye. If you live in Northern California, why not make plans for a visit and experience the aloe bloom for yourself? Flowering aloe panorama

A couple of weeks ago I attended a media preview party held by Timber Press, the Portland-based publishing company, at the Ruth Bancroft Garden to celebrate the upcoming release of The Bold Dry Garden: Lessons from the Ruth Bancroft Garden . Written by Johanna Silver, the garden editor of Sunset Magazine, and featuring photographs by Marion Brenner, this is the first book dedicated to the RBG. While the book won’t be available in stores until early October, everybody who attended the event received an advance copy signed not only by Johanna Silver and Marion Brenner but also by Ruth Bancroft herself! I will have a separate book review soon. Ruth Bancroft and curator Brian Kemble who has been working alongside Ruth since 1980. With his encyclopedic knowledge, Brian has been instrumental in making the RBG what it is now. (Photo © 2016 by Stephen Lysaght. Used with permission.) During the event, Ruth was sitting in the front row with her two daughters and friends. After visiting her ...

If you’ve followed Succulents and More for a little while, you probably know that the Ruth Bancroft Garden (RBG) in Walnut Creek, California is my favorite public garden ( click here to see my previous posts). Started by Ruth Bancroft when she was in her 60s, this dry garden is a wonderland of succulents and other plants adapted to survive with little water. Ruth lived to the venerable age of 109 (!) and saw her garden become a world-renowned showcase for xerophytic landscaping. There was no specific reason for me to go to the RBG on Black Friday, other than I didn’t have any commitments that day. As I was heading out, I realized that I hadn’t been there since February and that I hadn’t written about the RBG since my Garden of D’Lights post last December. High time to remedy that! Speaking of Garden of D’Lights: The RBG’s annual holiday light display opened on November 22 and will run until January 11 ( tickets here ). The hardware (power cords, lights, lasers, etc.) was visible, bu...