“Sneak-in” plantings? That is a term I use for any placement of a small plant into an unusual or random part of your garden. A place where most plants would fail or where one wouldn’t expect to see a plant. It is in these areas I like to place smaller-growing rare plants. I find that these types of plantings…
Sadly summer is coming to a close here in Southern California. Starting next month many of the plants in my garden will start to show the effects of the shorter days and cooler weather. To combat this I have planted a lot of winter growing and flowering plants to steal attention away from the plants…
There are three ways your average gardener can propagate an agave. It can be grown from seed, removed as a pup or sucker, or it can be done from pulling off bulbils (also called plantlets). Seed takes too long and in some cases you might not even end up with the same plant once grown up. Suckers are…
This past weekend I drove up to Los Angeles to visit the 31st Annual Inter-City Cactus and Succulent Show and Sale that took place at the Los Angeles Arboretum. LA traffic never makes things easy, so a 3-hour drive turned into 4 that Friday. The show was well worth the drive, however. The Inter-City Cactus and Succulent…
With the ever increasing popularity of water-wise gardens in Southern California, there is a similar increase in new plants available. The palette for gardeners increases almost daily. One plant that has been around for a while appears to me to be unjustly absent from that palette of many of these new water-wise gardeners. It is a plant that…
A few years ago when I started my blog I had no idea that the most popular post would end up being the post about my dwarf agaves. Readers have really gravitated to those posts. In fact, the most read page on my blog is the one on the work I did to my boutique agave planter…
This post most likely won’t be overly exciting to anyone other than a cactus collector. Still, a true plant lover can’t but appreciate the flowers on my Geohintonia mexicana that just opened. Cactus are the butt of many jokes from a few of my close, fellow plant collector friends that never got into the ‘cactus craze.’ Their belief is…
The original plant of Echeveria agavoides ‘Ebony’ was wild collected from habitat near Coahuila, Mexico, by John Trager and Myron Kimnach and it was first distributed by the International Succulent Introduction (ISI). Since its introduction into cultivation in early 2000, Echeveria agavoides ‘Ebony’ has been a collector’s delight. Slower to offset compared to other Echeveria agavoides types and greater growing difficulty in cultivation have…