Putting on a show this week in the garden are the Living Stones. No, not Mick, Keith, and Ronnie, but the horticultural Living Stones, Lithops aucampiae. Our oldest patch starts flowering in early to mid November each year, growing beautifully under an overhanging rock. For all the articles about how difficult they are to grow,
Don’t Miss the Stones latest show Read More »
Flowering in the crevice garden in early November is the little-known South African bulb, Strumaria discifera ssp. bulbifera. These hail from the winter wet/dry summer region of the Western Cape, and have been right at home in the ground here since 2018. Okay, so it’s not as flashy as a tulip of daffodil, but to
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We love it when people tell us that certain plants won’t grow in our climate. As gardening contrarians, we thrive on proving gardening experts wrong. Below is a great example–our combination of Globularia repens (Spain, Italy) and Acantholimon halophilum (Central Turkey) thriving in the dryland crevice garden. Both have sailed through out rainy, humid, hot
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Flowering this week is the lovely fall-flowering Allium thunbergii. This specimen is a 1993 Dan Hinkley collection from the Heuksan Islands, well off the coast of South Korea. Many of the plants on the Heuksan Islands have been isolated so long, that they have speciated (evolved into a new species). In this case, this plant
Through the years, we’ve killed far more than our share of Zauschnerias, California fuchsia, but a combination of building a crevice garden and planting the superb clone, Zauschneria canum var. arizonica ‘Sky Island Orange’, we have a winner. Our clump, which is in full flower in October, has been growing here since 2018. To say
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I can’t remember when I first met Cylindropuntia kleiniae, but it was somewhere back in my early years, during a family cross country drive, designed to expose us kids to the entirety of the US. I fell in love with cactus, despite being repeatedly stabbed as I tried to rescue a pad to take home.
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July has been a great month to enjoy the floral show of the most winter hardy member of the genus Aloe. Our plant of Aloe cooperi, below, is happy as can be, growing in half day sun in our crevice garden.
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We have been playing around with the genus Polygonella since 2000, but have still only grown 3 of the 11 US species so far. We are fascinated why these native, highly drought-tolerant members of the buckwheat (Polygonaceae) family aren’t more widely grown. The common name of jointweed, probably is the biggest factor in their lack
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Globularia is a genus of small, rock garden-sized plants in the Plantaginaceae family, with a native distribution centered around Mediterranean Europe. I admired these during our 2012 Balkan expedition, but it wasn’t until we constructed our crevice garden empire, that we really began to have much success with the dryland plants in our wet, humid
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Here’s another of those plants that virtually no one has either grown or even knows about. Handelia trichophylla is a little-known monotypic member of the aster family (Asteraceae). Not only does it have hairy, silver foliage, which usually spells certain death in our summers, but it hails from the “stans”, which include the low rainfall
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